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LIVING FOR THE FUTURE 



Etttng for tjje JFuture 

A STUDY IN THE ETHICS OF 
IMMORTALITY 



BY 



JOHN ROTHWELL SLATER, Ph.D. 

PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH IN THE UNIVERSITY 
OF ROCHESTER 




BOSTON AND NEW YORK 

HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY 

<&hz fittoer^ibc p>rcs£ Cambtt&oc 

1916 






S 



COPYRIGHT, 1916, BY JOHN ROTHWKLL SLATE* 
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 

Published October iQib 



OCT -3 1916 



CIA437966 



DEDICATED TO A GREAT TEACHER 

Who loved the past, labored for the present, and 
lived for the future : 

WILLIAM RAINEY HARPER 
1856-1906 

44 Our low life was the level's and the night's, 
He 's for the morning." 

44 Greet the unseen with a cheer.'* 



AVE MAGISTER 

SALVE IMMORTALIS 

BENE SIT TIBI 

VALE UBICUMQUE LABORAS 

TIBI POST DECEM ANNOS 

INVISO INAUDITO HAUD INCOGNITO 

DISCIPULI CONCLAMANTES GRATULAMUR 



LIVING FOR THE FUTURE 



THE JOURNEY 

As we rushy as we rush in the train, 

The trees and the houses go wheeling back, 

But the starry heavens above the plain 
Come flying on our track. 

All the beautiful stars of the sky, 

The silver doves of the forest of Nighty 

Over the dull earth swarm and fly, 
Companions of our flight. 

We will rush ever on without fear; 

Let the goal be far, the flight be fleet I 
Eor we carry the Heavens with us, dear, 

While the Earth slips from our feet I 

James Thomson 
(From Sunday at Hampstead) 



LIVING FOR THE FUTURE 



Within a few years all of us will be 
thinking without brains, feeling with- 
out nerves, seeing and hearing without 
eyes or ears. Lacking hands and pock- 
ets, we can carry nothing with us, not 
even credentials of good character. All 
that we shall have will be what we 
are. Stripped of all possessions, tradi- 
tions, and apologies, we shall, so it 
seems now, find ourselves somewhat 
at a loss to explain ourselves to the 
universe. 

Yet somehow, somewhere, we shall 
be very much alive, more alive than 
we can now imagine. Let us not al- 

i 



LIVING FOR THE FUTURE 

ways speak about our souls when we 
contemplate the future. Your soul is 
yourself, more or less imperfectly pos- 
sessed of a body which is sure to elude 
you in the end. Some little fiber snaps, 
some cell or bit of tissue protests five 
minutes too long against its ancient 
enemies, and suddenly a curious bit of 
machinery is stopped forever. In the 
temple of life there hangs a precious 
lamp, carefully tended for these many 
years by the unseen ministers of being; 
but now its silver cord is loosed, its 
golden bowl is broken. In the last 
brief flare of that fallen lamp you see 
your last of darkness. Those about you 
had been shaking their heads at one 
another, but now their heads all nod 
together. You wonder what they have 
found to agree upon after all this dis- 

2 



LIVING FOR THE FUTURE 

sent. Somebody says, "He's gone"; 
but instead of that, they are suddenly 
gone, and you find yourself alone. 

" Very well," you say to yourself, 
" those nerves and arteries were n't of 
much use to me anyway for the last 
five years. Most of what I really ac- 
complished had to be done in spite of 
them, for they were always quarreling. 
Now for a free life at last. Good-bye, 
dust and ashes. Your feeble spark's 
gone out. I thought it was night when 
I turned away from your cold hearth, 
but when I open the door I find myself 
outdoors in the sun. Come, let's be 
off." 

Now there are many ways of look- 
ing at this inevitable prospect. There 
is the fatalistic way — as Edgar says, 
in King Lear, — 

3 



LIVING FOR THE FUTURE 

u Men must endure 
Their going hence, even as their coming hither ; 
Ripeness is all." 

There is the way of curious and 
somber speculation, the anatomy of 
melancholy, Hamlet's way: — 

".What dreams may come 
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil 
Must give us pause." 

There is the way of studied and 
forced indifference, the way of those 
who say, " One life at a time." Walter 
Savage Landor, on his seventy-fifth 
birthday, wrote these proudly pagan 
lines: — 

"I strove with none, for none was worth my 
strife. 
Nature I loved, and next to Nature, Art. 
I warmed my hands before the fire of life ; 
It sinks, and I am ready to depart." 

4 



LIVING FOR THE FUTURE 

This attitude, which seeks to be stoi- 
cal, grows morbid by and by. There 
is an age when old friends begin to 
drop off faster than new ones come. 
"All, all are gone, the old familiar 
faces." Then comes the time when you 
go round the house at twilight, locking 
up unused rooms until you are fairly 
burdened with the keys, and are tempted 
to throw them away. 

There is the way of religious exalta- 
tion, the way of martyr and saint and 
apostle — " to be absent from the body, 
and to be present with the Lord." While 
for the Christian it ought to be true 
that " to die is gain," the general senti- 
ment of the Christian world at the 
present time is not altogether in keep- 
ing with scriptural teaching at this 
point. If Christians really believe that 

S 



/LIVING FOR THE FUTURE 

death is only an incident in eternal life, 
separating the visible world from an 
invisible world of equal reality and su- 
perior opportunity, they have a strange 
way of showing it. Mourning is just as 
black, sorrow is often just as blind, 
among Christians as among those who 
profess no such comfortable faith. But 
the fact remains that, except when the 
sharpness of personal grief prevents, 
the Christian way of looking at man's 
mortality is a hopeful way. At Easter 
we celebrate, not the Pauline doctrine 
of the resurrection of the body, which 
is incomprehensible to many in this 
age, but the Platonic doctrine of the 
immortality of the soul, which has 
quietly taken its place as if it had always 
been a part of the Christian view of the 
future. 

6 



LIVING FOR THE FUTURE 

And finally, the last way of looking 
at this mystery is the way of supersti- 
tion on the one hand, and of so-called 
psychical research on the other. One 
hesitates to class them together, for any 
fair-minded observer must be aware 
how carefully the leaders in psychical 
research strive to avoid those elements 
of credulity, fear, and commercial ex- 
ploitation in the attitude of the seeker 
toward the unknown which make up 
what we call superstition. Psychical 
research deserves the respect even of 
those who see no use in it and have no 
use for it; superstition does not. Yet 
the two have this in common, that they 
tend to subordinate the plain duties, 
the main business of life, to a study of 
that which is hidden. They are both 
absorbed in an inquisitive and over- 

7 



LIVING FOR THE FUTURE 

anxious search for whispers in the 
darkness. 

One sits in his little amateur wire- 
less laboratory, listening for wandering 
flashes from the ships at sea; and now 
and then he hears the cross-currents 
crackling in the air from amateurs like 
himself. There are many of them " lis- 
tening in," and some of them, he sus- 
pects, sending out spurious messages. 
Sometimes in a great storm there is a 
strange humming in his ears, as if un- 
known, powerful currents of the upper 
air were interfering with his aerial. 
And once, when the night was very 
still, he thought he heard one of the 
great Government stations on the Isth- 
mus calling Arlington ; but whether the 
call came from the land or from the 
ocean side, he could not tell. He only 

8 



LIVING FOR THE FUTURE 

knows that the air is full of voices, and 
that for most of them his little toy ap- 
paratus is totally inadequate. He does 
not conclude that there is nothing there, 
but rather that there is too much for 
man as yet to comprehend, or even to 
apprehend. In other words, those who 
have looked longest and most patiently 
into the alleged phenomena of psychi- 
cal research are, on the one hand, the 
readiest to admit the marvels of in- 
tercommunication between the minds 
of living men across wide spaces, and, 
on the other hand, profoundly skepti- 
cal of the existence of any real evi- 
dence for communication with the 
spirit world. 

Now it may be interesting for once 
to dismiss all these ways of looking at 
the future — the fatalistic way, the raor* 

9 



LIVING FOR THE FUTURE 

bid, agnostic way, the stoic, the devout, 
the occult — and to consider this most 
tremendous of all subjects from a new 
angle. 



II 

Upon the threshold of such an in- 
quiry, does any one have the feeling 
that these thoughts are uncanny, un- 
wholesome, unwise? Is it morbid for 
an immortal being to look more than 
thirty or forty years ahead? We do 
that when we are taking out life insur- 
ance, or making a long lease, or writing 
a will. In youth we feel immortal, and 
will have no bounds to our domain. 
Can it be that as years come and wis- 
dom widens, the wise man ought to 
accustom himself to shorter instead of 
longer views? Why climb, except for 
the hope of seeing far? Hamlet, though 
not unaware of the danger of " thinking 
too precisely on the event," yet speaks 

ii 



LIVING FOR THE FUTURE 

with assurance of the duty of man to 
face the future without dismay: — 

u Sure he that made us with such large discourse, 
Looking before and after, gave us not 
That capability and god-like reason 
To fust in us unused." 

Or, if it be not morbid, is it, as some 
seem to think, irreverent to speculate 
beyond the meager revelation of con- 
ventional religion? Is it profane to turn 
from the earthly altar, where we think 
we worship God, to gaze up that wind- 
ing stairway by which our friends have 
ascended into the unknown? Is there 
not also a great altar there ? 

We find it profoundly stimulating to 
study in anthropology and in history the 
question, whence we have come. Why 
should it be either dispiriting or unspir- 
itual to study, wherever and however we 

12 



LIVING FOR THE FUTURE 

may, the equally interesting question, 
whither we are going? In this world of 
destiny much depends upon whether we 
stand weakly waiting for destiny to come 
and find us, or march boldly forward to 
meet it in the open. Lack of complete 
information about the future is no reason 
for indifference, nor is the lack of ade- 
quate means of getting information. We 
are all looking further than we can see, 
hoping more than we can prove, and at- 
tempting more than we can finish; if we 
are not, we are dead already, and some- 
body had better tell us so. At sea the 
lookout ahead is doubled in foggy 
weather. What a fool that captain would 
be who called in the watch because the 
heavy curtain of ocean mist shut out the 
horizon. In our attitude toward all the 
other secrets of the universe, the less we 

l 3 



LIVING FOR THE FUTURE 

can see the harder we look. Here alone, 
because we can prove nothing, we are 
asked to refrain from reasonable infer- 
ence and useful hypothesis. 

This demand for a prohibition of all 
speculative inquiry concerning the future 
must be denied. We are not to shut our 
eyes when the way grows obscure ; that 
is neither faith nor common sense. " Man 
goeth to his long home." He knows it, 
and has always known it. He knows not 
where that home may be, but he knows 
that he is a pilgrim. It is useless for him 
to pretend otherwise. Austin Dobson 
gives us the picture in his couplet: — 

" Time goes, you say; ah, no, 
Alas, time stays ; we go." 

But why "alas"? Lorado Taft, our 
idealist sculptor, sees no melancholy in the 
poet's verse. He has made it the theme of 

H 



LIVING FOR THE FUTURE 

a great sculptural group which will some 
day find a place in Washington Park, 
Chicago, at the western end of the broad 
boulevard called the Midway Plaisance. 
His Fountain of Time, of which models 
have already been exhibited, will repre- 
sent the heroic figure of Time overlooking 
the vast, hurrying procession of mankind. 
Out of a jet of water rise infant forms, who 
turn their childish footsteps after the 
youths and maidens that have preceded 
them. In the center of the long column 
are warriors, horsemen, strong men and 
beautiful women, all marching forward 
with heads erect and banners floating. 
Beyond them are the bending shoulders 
of the aged and the halting footsteps of 
those who are about to sink back to 
the earth from which they came. But 
all, all — the children, the youths, the 

15 



LIVING FOR THE FUTURE 

heroes, and the grandsires every one- 
are gazing forward toward some goal 
they cannot see. This vision it is that 
keeps them marching; and for it, we 
may be sure, Time envies them their 
eternity. 

It is not the brief cycle of the body, 
dust to dust, but this long straight line 
of the soul's vision, that will make Lo- 
rado Taft's fountain a work of prophetic 
genius when it is some day embodied 
in marble ; not the dust, rising in tran- 
sient foam and falling in vanishing 
spray, but the spirit that endures as 
seeing that which is invisible; man the 
unconquerable, man the imperishable, 
man the explorer and the heir of eter- 
nity. 

"Time goes, you say; ah, no, 
Thank God, time stays ; we go.** 

16 



LIVING FOR THE FUTURE 

There is then no theoretical ground 
upon which we need hesitate to consider 
the subject of living for the future. If 
there were any practical ground, it would 
be the fact that under a superseded the- 
ology Christian people once thought so 
much of the future that they forgot the 
present and its duties. That is no longer 
true. The pendulum has swung so far 
the other way that to listen to some 
of our preachers one would almost 
think they were as much ashamed of 
heaven as they have long been politely 
skeptical of hell. The gospel of the 
kingdom is now so nearly identified in 
some quarters with model tenements, 
district nurses, and eugenics, that one 
wonders if hygiene and holiness are the 
same thing. Religion has done so much 
during the past thirty years to make this 

17 



LIVING FOR THE FUTURE 

world a better place to live in that some 
of us have become curiously indifferent 
to the relative values of sociology and 
character. Cleanliness is indeed next 
to godliness, whatever the mediaeval 
church may have thought about it; but 
it does not follow that a daily bath is 
a complete substitute for the holy 
communion. 

It is to be hoped that Christianity may 
succeed in bringing into the industrial 
world enough of unselfishness (or of en- 
lightened selfishness, whichever it may 
be) to insure the success of profit-shar- 
ing and the living wage and other cor- 
rectives for economic inequalities* But 
we may find then that neither employers 
nor employed have thereby added mate- 
rially to the store of heavenly treasures. 
No one doubts that to abolish bad drain- 

18 



LIVING FOR THE FUTURE 

age or improve the milk supply is a 
Christian act; but it may have less than 
we suppose in common with the real 
elevation of mankind. Both in sanitation 
and in scientific and mechanical effi- 
ciency this age is immeasurably superior 
to all preceding centuries. Yet it has 
not been shown that in intellectual effi- 
ciency or spiritual quality we can even 
equal the past. 

Such reflections diminish in no sense 
the value of the social emphasis in con- 
temporary Christianity, but they do lead 
us to inquire whether the loss of the long 
look forward and upward is not to be 
regretted. Let us agree that our ances- 
tors thought too much about the future 
and too little about the present. Let us 
agree that for practical purposes it is 
best to live chiefly as if we were prepar- 

19 



LIVING FOR THE FUTURE 

ing to leave the earth a better place than 
we found it. But let us also give our- 
selves the pleasure now and then of a 
brief excursion into the world where 
we shall all be when men celebrate 
the centenary of the great war, and of 
the great peace that we hope shall fol- 
low. What sort of world must it be? 
And what bearing has that world upon 
this ? 

John Ruskin complained, in the intro- 
duction to " The Crown of Wild Olive," 
of "the difficulty of knowing whether 
to address one's audience as believing 
or not believing in any other world than 
this." He said : — 

" If you address any average modern 
English company as believing in an eter- 
nal life, and then endeavor to draw any 
conclusions from this assumed belief as 

20 



LIVING FOR THE FUTURE 

to their present business, they will forth- 
with tell you that ' What you say is very 
beautiful, but it is not practical.' If, on 
the contrary, you frankly address them 
as unbelievers in eternal life, and try to 
draw any consequences from that unbe- 
lief — they immediately hold you for an 
accursed person, and shake off the dust 
from their feet at you. . . . The dilemma 
is unavoidable. Men must either here- 
after live or hereafter die; fate may 
be bravely met, and conduct wisely or- 
dered, on either expectation, but never in 
hesitation between ungrasped hope and 
unconfronted fear. We usually believe 
in immortality so far as to avoid prepara- 
tion for death ; and in mortality so far as 
to avoid preparation for anything after 
death. Whereas the wise man will at 
least hold himself ready for one or other 

21 



LIVING FOR THE FUTURE 

of two events of which one or other 
is inevitable, and will have all things 
ended in order for his sleep, or left in 
order for his awakening." 



Ill 

In the following inquiry, which as- 
sumes the belief in immortality as a 
starting-point, images derived from the 
Scriptures will be deliberately avoided, 
for the sake of whatever freshness of ap- 
prehension may come from studying an 
old subject from a new angle. Further- 
more, the speculations of spiritualism, 
theosophy, and other systems that have 
their center in the invisible world will 
not be examined or criticised. Our pur- 
pose is not philosophical but practical; 
not metaphysical but ethical. There are 
several things about the future life that 
seem absolutely certain, provided we 
believe in personal immortality at all. 
That belief, of course, is a matter not of 

23 



LIVING FOR THE FUTURE 

proof but of faith or of intuition; and the 
correctness of it is not an issue in the 
present discussion. Readers who expect 
to find here any arguments in support of 
immortality itself will be disappointed. 
But readers who believe in personal im- 
mortality, without being able to attach 
to that belief any sense of reality or any 
practical consequences, may perhaps be 
led into certain inferences, conjectures, 
and hopes, that will be not without in- 
terest for the intellectual and the moral 
life. 1 

1 Although the inquiry is not metaphysical, two 
philosophical objections are likely to occur to some 
readers of these pages. In the first place, the language 
used may at times seem to imply a dualistic view of the 
universe, in which matter and spirit, or mind, are re- 
garded as two separate and more or less antagonistic 
entities. Such a misapprehension of the writer's posi- 
tion would be due to the limitations of language in 
dealing with fundamental questions in a non-technical 
way. It is not easy to see what part that which we 
colloquially call " matter " can have in a spiritual 

24 



LIVING FOR THE FUTURE 

Our reasoning will be altogether de- 
ductive or a priori inference from the 

world ; and from this point of view a spiritual being, 
deprived of his physical body and continuing to exist, 
might be thought of as pure 6pirit unrelated to matter. 
But of course the universe is really not a duality but a 
unit; matter is probably only the manifestation of the 
divine as Force, while mind is the manifestation of the 
divine as Consciousness. And a new organization of 
forces, dominated by laws partly unknown to us at pres- 
ent, may serve the individual soul in the future life as 
his means of impression and expression, his " spiritual 
body." Instead of a greater gap than now appears to 
exist between mind and matter, there may be a higher 
synthesis. The subject involves so many profound 
metaphysical problems, over which wise men have 
pondered for ages, that one could not hope to do more 
here than to enter a caveat against the charge of dual- 
ism. It is perhaps unnecessary to add an even more 
emphatic disclaimer of pantheism. In view of the de- 
liberate avoidance in this essay of Christian doctrines 
about human destiny, it may be well, however, to say 
that the whole discussion is based on the reality of 
what we call personality, and that personality implies 
a personal God. 

Again, the argument from analogy, here so widely 
used, may be attacked on the ground that we are so 
utterly ignorant of the nature of the invisible world 
that no attempted analogy can carry any force, not 
even a probability or a plausible hypothesis. The ob- 
jection is a grave one ; and if anything approaching 
philosophical demonstration were here attempted, it 

25 



LIVING FOR THE FUTURE 

assumed and implied meanings of the 
two words " personal immortality." 
That these speculations can ever be 
checked by any sort of credible confir- 
mation from the other side is highly 
doubtful. There is no commoner obser- 
vation made by those who examine the 
alleged communications from the spirit 
world than that their uniform triviality 
forbids us to consider them seriously, 
even if no other question were raised. 
In the main, the criticism is justified. 1 
While scientific investigation of the so- 
called psychic phenomena is both inter- 

would be fatal. But we start with the postulate of per- 
sonal immortality, and must inevitably attach to the 
terms such meanings as the present world gives us. If 
one rejects the postulate, and prefers to substitute for 
personal immortality either annihilation or a merging 
of the individual soul into the divine, he will of course 
not care to read beyond this point. The argument from 
analogy, precarious as it is, is the only form of reason- 
ing that can yield even speculative results here. 
1 But see below, page 129, footnote. 

26 



LIVING FOR THE FUTURE 

esting and indirectly valuable to the 
world, we seem not yet to have derived 
from it any atom of proved fact regard- 
ing the nature of immortality. Indeed, 
many who would be glad to think other- 
wise feel obliged to deny that any con- 
firmation of immortality itself can be 
found by the unbiased mind in all the 
curious records of more than thirty years 
of organized collection of data in this 
field. Such fascinating books as that 
of the late F. W. H. Myers on " Human 
Personality and Its Survival of Bodily 
Death," and Henry Holt's "On the 
Cosmic Relations," derive their chief 
interest for many a thoughtful reader 
from their searching and often brilliant 
analysis of the inner life as lived in the 
body, rather than from any of the occult 
marvels which they relate or the theo- 

27 



LIVING FOR THE FUTURE 

ries based thereon. After all such read- 
ing one is left with a disappointed, but 
still with an open mind. Hamlet, who 
was a charter member of the Society for 
Psychical Research, and lived and died 
in its service, has summed it all up in 
the familiar lines, — 

" There are more things in heaven and earth, 
Horatio, 
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy." 

But in this discussion nothing will 
be based on occult speculation. We 
are here interested to examine solely 
those implications concerning immortal- 
ity which arise from what we know of 
personality and personal life. Assum- 
ing that we shall survive as persons, 
what follows? 



IV 

In the first place, our future life will 
not be idle. Instead of repeating the 
rather trite and tasteless witticisms at 
the expense of a heaven where rest and 
worship are eternal, we may simply ask 
for a candid answer to these questions: 
" Do you want immortality with nothing 
to do? If.it were offered you on those 
terms, would you not find a way of re- 
fusing it? Would you not rather be ex- 
tinguished than exist forever in a world 
full of idle saints?" 

The questions answer themselves. 
Life, the life of the soul as well as of 
the body, is in its very nature rhythmi- 
cal. It is made up not altogether either 
of effort or of relaxation. There is the 

29 



LIVING FOR THE FUTURE 

work and the play and the rest. After 
the sleep there is the waking, after the 
hour of calm and contemplation the day 
of struggle and of victory. However it 
may be with the oriental mystic, reli- 
gion for us is only half renunciation and 
communion. The other half is the reali- 
zation of the higher self through effort. 
If we are assuming a "personal immor- 
tality," both terms of the assumption 
forbid an idle heaven. For personality 
demands effort to resist the constant 
tendencies toward degeneration and im- 
personality; and immortality, which is 
only another name for life, must, if it 
be anything like the life ive know, 
represent a permanent resistance to the 
forces of spiritual mortality. There must, 
if the soul really lives hereafter and is 
not merely preserved or embalmed in an 

3° 



LIVING FOR THE FUTURE 

arrested state, be an endless spiritual 
integration, in order to prevent the far 
easier disintegration that so easily over- 
takes us. This is by no means a sinister 
suggestion that we may have to carry 
into another world our weary struggle 
against moral failure and collapse; it is 
only a reminder that if heaven be, as 
most of us think, a place of moral prog- 
ress and improvement, it must also be 
a place of moral effort. In some form 
or other, the discipline and the delight of 
work must not be altogether lacking. 

What a disappointing heaven it would 
be, if we should find when we got used 
to it that all the really interesting work 
belonged to the angels; that whenever 
a messenger was to be sent somewhere 
to avert a danger or to announce a joy, 
the task was assigned to an impossibly 

3 1 



LIVING FOR THE FUTURE 

perfect being who had never lived on 
earth, and so had never really done any- 
thing to earn the coveted privilege of 
work! If this sounds flippant, one may 
put it in more decorous words, but some- 
how the question must be answered : " Is 
it not certain that a future life worth 
having will give us something to do that 
is worth doing, and supply us with the 
means to do it ? " 



V 

In the second place, if the future life 
is not to be an idle life, its activities 
must be such as belong to the realm of 
the spirit. 

By the spirit (or soul) will be meant 
throughout this discussion all of the 
mind that can survive 'physical death. 
We are not here raising the grave 
question how any of the mind can re- 
main after the loss of the brain, which 
has seemed to be its organ. That in it- 
self is a staggering thing to believe, but 
most of us do believe it, nevertheless. 
We believe it as a matter of faith; and 
the whole of the present inquiry is noth- 
ing more than an attempt, not to defend 
that faith by reasoning, but to apply 

33 



LIVING FOR THE FUTURE 

reason to the analysis, the illustration, 
the imaginative development of a belief 
which must itself be taken for granted. 
A very large part of the mystery and 
gloom with which some religious people 
surround this whole subject is due to an 
untenable and impossible psychology. 
Many persons have a feeling, which 
they have never put into words, and 
would perhaps be slow to confess, that 
somehow the only part of them that can 
survive death is the specifically religious 
instinct. They think of the soul as that 
part of their total personality which is 
supposed to be active chiefly on Sunday 
mornings, and when they are saying 
their prayers and reading their Bibles. 
The notion is about on a par with the 
idea of heaven that most of us acquired 
in childhood, as a place up in the sky 

34 



LIVING FOR THE FUTURE 

near the stars. Both are illogical survivals 
from a type of religion which has itself 
well nigh disappeared, wherein spiritual 
experience was divorced from daily life. 
It is unthinkable to-day that there can 
be such a thing as a soul or spirit in 
man which is independent of his intelli- 
gence, his feeling, his will. 

The fact that the Greek and the Latin 
languages have separate words for soul 
and spirit, as well as various words for 
the different functions of the mind, has 
tended to confuse and embarrass our 
modern thought. In popular usage, and 
in this present discussion, the words 
"soul" and " spirit" are practically syn- 
onymous. It is possible, even in Eng- 
lish, to make a distinction between them 
in a philosophical vocabulary, but un- 
necessary and over-subtle in ordinary 

35 



LIVING FOR THE FUTURE 

speech. But all of us feel that between 
them on the one hand and the word 
" mind " on the other there is some sort 
of difference. When we speak of the 
mind, we use it as a collective name for 
all those thoughts, feelings, and volitions 
which appear in the stream of conscious- 
ness at one time or another ; many of them 
trivial, many of them almost or entirely 
automatic, many of them entirely de- 
pendent on the bodily functions. When 
we speak of the soul, we do not think, 
as the ancients did, of some subtle vital 
principle or essence. We do not think 
of the spirit as a breath or a vapor. We 
think rather, in either case, of that which 
is dominant in personality, the higher 
feelings, the higher ideals, the immedi- 
ate intuitions of truth, and most of all, 
the will. 

36 



LIVING FOR THE FUTURE 

It is both interesting and important 
to observe that when we speak of the 
" souls " of men whose higher feelings 
are very low, whose ideals are sensual, 
whose intuitions of truth, if they have 
any, are rudimentary, and whose domi- 
nant control is not will but impulse, we 
mean by that word their assumed capa- 
city for a spiritual growth which can 
arise only from a mental stimulus. 
About all the "soul" such a man 
seems to have is a dormant and unde- 
veloped will, which can be aroused 
only through his dormant recollections, 
his perverted imagination, his blunted 
feelings. In him the soul is apparently 
only a very small and insignificant part 
of the mind, and derives its supreme 
importance in the moral world from 
the mysterious power of the hidden 

37 



LIVING FOR THE FUTURE 

seeds of goodness to germinate and 
grow in any soil. 

What we must for the moment dwell 
upon is that those higher aspects of 
consciousness, those factors of person- 
ality, which we call the soul, and be- 
lieve to be immortal, can by no means 
be separated from what we call the 
mind. Remember how closely the dawn 
of religious experience in the normal 
life is associated with the physical and 
psychical changes of childhood and 
adolescence. Consider how inseparably 
the spiritual experiences of mature life 
are connected on the side of religious 
aspiration with such mental experi- 
ences as those of imagination and mem- 
ory, in the recollection of past events 
and in the emotional effects upon us of 
poetry, music, painting, and architec- 

38 



LIVING FOR THE FUTURE 

ture; and equally connected on the 
side of conduct with the duties, the 
problems, the physical and mental crises 
of the individual and of society. A 
soul which had lost all its powers of 
contact with the rich and wonderful 
treasures of memory and imagination, 
which could no longer perceive and 
conceive and reason as we do (or in 
some better way), would be no friend 
of ours. He might be an angel, but we 
do not want to be angels. We want to 
be ourselves. 



VI 

If it is the whole man, the real per- 
son, that survives the death of the body, 
then it ought to be evident to any one 
that an immortality which preserves 
only the one religious function of ado- 
ration or worship is impossible, and, to 
the healthy mind, undesirable. If "con- 
gregations ne'er break up, and Sab- 
baths have no end," many of us besides 
the traditional small boy would ask to 
be excused. If we could not look 
forward to Monday morning, we had 
rather stop at Saturday night. 

Frank speech on this subject may in- 
deed offend sensitive ears long used to 
the traditional platitudes. It may also 
trouble the souls of those whose inner 

40 



LIVING FOR THE FUTURE 

life is so wholly and genuinely saintly 
that the heaven of Milton or of Dante 
is really thinkable and congenial to 
them. All that one can reply to the 
one class is that if we had more frank- 
ness about our future it would be much 
better for our present; and to the other, 
that if we were all saints, the saintly 
future of devout mediaeval imagination 
would doubtless seem as attractive to 
us as it did to the monkish author of 
" Jerusalem the Golden." A Cardinal 
Newman can write, and his rapt dis- 
ciples can understand, a "Dream of 
Gerontius," But if we really believe, 
as we seem to, that the invisible world 
is full of people who were not while 
on earth primarily given to religious 
ecstasy, but rather to the plodding pur- 
suit of homely duty, we must make a 

4i 



LIVING FOR THE FUTURE 

place for them in our speculations. And 
as these plain people are in the majority 
in this world, they can hardly be treated 
as exceptional in the next. 

It cannot be irreverent to try to con- 
ceive of a sort of heaven where our 
dear friends the beloved physician, the 
busy man of affairs, the scholarly sci- 
entist, the soldier, the college athlete, 
the restless boy, the home-loving mother, 
the playful child, have been happy and 
busy through all the long years since 
they left us behind. If we are to think 
of them all as living still their own 
lives, doing their own best work, play- 
ing their own best play, being their 
own best selves, then we must think of 
them as having carried with them all 
of memory, all of reason, all of the curi- 
osities and interests and sympathies and 

42 



LIVING FOR THE FUTURE 

helpful ministries of whatever sort that 
made them what we loved and honored 
here. That is why we are led to think 
that the spirit which is immortal is 
nothing less than the mind, minus only 
that part of mental life clearly tempo- 
rary because dependent on the body. 



VII 

But to say that the spirit is nothing 
less than the mind — - with the excep- 
tion just noted — is not to say that the 
spirit is nothing more than the mind 
as we know it. If it were, what could 
we hope for the future of those whose 
minds have given way under the strain 
of life, or those others whose minds 
were from the beginning clouded and 
incapable of education? Have they no 
souls ? Is there no immortality for the 
innocent victims of disease, the helpless 
tools of crime ? These darker mysteries 
might well appal us if we were to make 
the fatal error of identifying soul and 
brain, or brain function. But who that 
has not witnessed some of the miracles 

44 



LIVING FOR THE FUTURE 

of subconscious life suddenly brought 
to the surface in hours of crisis can 
realize how much more the spirit may 
be than the conscious mind as we ordi- 
narily know it? What vast reservoirs 
of spiritual sympathy and endurance 
may not lie hidden beneath the com- 
monplaces of our little days; what won- 
ders of patience beneath the worn-out 
nerves, what hidden purity below the 
polluted surface, what undiscovered 
heroism in the defeated, what unused 
strength in the weak, what hopes of sal- 
vation in the lost, what light behind the 
darkness, what life within the dead? 

This hidden life, this real life of the 
soul, which we see here only as by 
lightning-flashes in a storm, is a won- 
derful thing. Life itself is the great sur- 
prise, the unguessed secret, " the undis- 

45 



LIVING FOR THE FUTURE 

covered country from whose bourne no 
traveler returns." For all those who 
really understand life have left it, and 
left it without revealing its ultimate 
meaning. If we could read all its mys- 
teries, we could have heaven here and 
now. The human mind is the true Apoc- 
alypse of God, and out of it or nothing 
must be made the New Jerusalem. It 
is too precious to be lost, too full of 
worth to be laid away like an outworn 
garment, too eternal to be altogether 
bound to Time. 

44 All we have willed or hoped or dreamed of 

good shall exist, 
Not its semblance, but itself ; no beauty, nor 

good, nor power 
Whose voice has gone forth, but each survives 

for the melodist 
When eternity affirms the conception of an 

hour." 



VIII 

We have already reasoned from the 
nature of personality that the future life 
must be an active, not an idle life, and 
that its activities must be such as be- 
long to the spirit. We have enlarged 
the vague popular conception of the 
spirit to include all that is highest in 
the mind. Now we must inquire what 
kind of activities can belong to a spirit 
without a physical body. 

Notice that it is the physical body 
only that we must learn to do without. 
Who can doubt that the spirit will be 
somehow equipped with senses more 
acute, and means of expression more 
accurate and more powerful, than any 
of which we know? A spirit able to 

47 



LIVING FOR THE FUTURE 

know but not to tell, able to wish but 
not to do, sensitive to force but incapa- 
ble of exerting force, would deserve 
our pity, not our admiration. If the im- 
mortals, in the presence of mightier 
powers than we have yet perceived, 
lack even such humble efficiency as 
goes with human hands and lips, they 
are but souls in prison; and that we 
may be quite sure they are not. For 
immortality is only another name for 
freedom. But of what sort the " spirit- 
ual body " may be, what forces it may 
control, what limitations it may have, 
what relations it may sustain to the 
world of time and space which is all 
we know, are questions quite beyond 
the scope of this discussion. Knowing 
only that the physical body must be left 
behind, we can still speculate not un- 

4 8 



LIVING FOR THE FUTURE 

profitably on the question how far a 
spirit can be thought of as active with- 
out a literal voice for speech or a fleshly 
hand for labor. 

It is not so hard a question as it was 
a generation ago. We live in the age of 
wireless — the wireless telegraph, the 
wireless telephone, wireless transmis- 
sion of electrical power. When the hu- 
man voice can be heard from the banks 
of the Potomac to the Eiffel Tower, and 
its echoes roll half way round the world 
to Honolulu, telepathy no longer seems 
an impossible violation of natural law. 
Force acting across space without any 
medium save the hypothetical ether that 
no chemist will ever find is a common- 
place to-day. Mind acting across space 
through the same medium, or without 
any medium save mind itself, is not so 

49 



LIVING FOR THE FUTURE 

wild a dream as it seemed even twenty 
years ago. Much is here possible that 
is yet unproved, and perhaps unprova- 
ble. So far as the evidence is concerned, 
all that can be said is that occasional 
genuine instances of minds acting upon 
minds at a long distance have not been 
plausibly explained as coincidences ; and 
that mind-reading at short distances, 
however explained, is accepted as a fact 
by nearly all who have themselves wit- 
nessed the phenomena. 

But what I have reference to here is 
something much less obscure and less 
debatable. You get a letter from your 
friend, and your whole life is changed. 
Changed by what? By the letter? By the 
ink and the paper? Absurd. Changed 
entirely by your own motives and per- 
sonal history, which really had deter- 

5° 



LIVING FOR THE FUTURE 

mined your destiny even before the let- 
ter came? Equally absurd. Changed, 
then, by your own powerful image in 
memory and imagination of your friend, 
freshly raised to the focus of conscious- 
ness by the stimulus of the letter — so, 
really, changed by yourself after all? 
Often, of course, it is so. But who has 
not felt, if only once or twice, the in- 
visible hand upon the shoulder, the 
inaudible whisper in the soul, that is 
something altogether outside the self, 
that commands the self, and draws it 
away from the compelling past and to- 
ward the mysterious future ? Who does 
not know the difference between the 
commonplace feeling, "I am thinking 
of my friend," and the rare and utterly 
different feeling, " He is thinking of 
me"? 

5* 



LIVING FOR THE FUTURE 

May one go further, and tread upon 
holy ground? May one ask you what 
you knew to be true when you found, 
after the gates of silence had closed 
upon your friend, some written word 
of his meant for your eye alone, some 
last message, some treasured memento, 
some ultimate revelation of unsuspected 
love ? Could you say only in that hour, 
"So he thought last month, last year, 
so he loved, so he hoped, so he wished 
to help, but could not then because he 
feared to be misunderstood"? Some of 
us can say more. We can say, " So he 
thinks and loves and hopes now. So 
he helps me now, from those hills 
whence cometh all my help." 

It is not only of the divine that we 
may use Matthew Arnold's phrase, " a 
power not ourselves that makes for 

52 



LIVING FOR THE FUTURE 

righteousness." There is an influence 
that comes to us unawares, a hush 
of the spirit, a high summons like 
a bugle, a solemn reminder like a bell; 
a strange joy that sends us singing 
through the day. These are the things 
we feel and do not tell. There ought 
to be many things we feel and do 
not tell, for only so perhaps can we 
keep well filled the spiritual reser- 
voirs that feed the streams of life. May 
it not be that the things which they 
who have gone from us feel and do not 
tell are among the things that keep us 
going? May it not be that those hours 
of exaltation to which we look forward 
and backward along our way are in part 
our times of sharing the rich, deep wis- 
dom of the dead? 

Who knows, indeed, but that the rea- 

53 



LIVING FOR THE FUTURE 

son why the immortals speak to us only 
through their eloquent silence is that 
they have too much to say ? What have 
words to do with perfect love? At 
Christmas time, when something of 
childish magic comes back to grace 
the little festivals of the home, when 
sparkling snow and twinkling candles 
lighten the eyes of old and young 
together, may it not be that there is 
one among us whom we see not, who 
is not known in the breaking of bread, 
who stands beside the hearth and beside 
the table, and hallows all, as indeed she 
used to do, and has always done ? 

At Easter, your soul rises again. Who 
lifts it? Are there not many hands that 
beckon, and many voices that swell 
your resurrection choral ? Has not God 
invisible helpers, who know best how to 

54 



LIVING FOR THE FUTURE 

reach your heart and mine and make us 
better? "This corruptible must put on 
incorruption, and this mortal must put 
on immortality." When shall we begin 
to put it on, and how, if there be not some 
few who already wear the white gar- 
ments of eternity, and can show us how 
to weave heaven out of earth? It may 
be fancy and it may be fact, that some 
of us, if we are ever saved, will be 
saved by the patience of our unseen 
friends. 

Of the activities possible, then, in a 
spiritual world, the first and perhaps 
the greatest may be the silent influence 
for good upon other spirits, in both 
worlds. Influence for good is a very 
broad term. It may mean the enlighten- 
ment of error, the reinforcement of 
weakness, the steady, persistent re- 

55 



LIVING FOR THE FUTURE 

minder of past privilege and aspiration. 
Matthew Arnold understood this when 
he wrote : — 

" We cannot kindle when we will 
The fire which in the heart resides ; 
The spirit bloweth and is still, 
In mystery our soul abides. 

But tasks in hours of insight willed 
Can be through hours of gloom fulfilled." 

Hours of insight; hours sometimes of 
a purely intellectual insight, when the 
worth of the moral ideal is suddenly and 
briefly revealed in all its beauty. But 
hours often when your good angel says, 
" Remember ! " You ask in vain, whether 
in petulance or in prayer, " Remember 
what?" The answer comes only as be- 
fore, like a distant bell that sounds the 
passing hours, "Remember, remem- 
ber!" It is life's warning signal, eter- 

56 



LIVING FOR THE FUTURE 

nity's cipher message to time, the fu- 
ture's summons to the present. There 
are many that send that message to us 
by night and by day; many that live 
beyond the mountains, and some that 
sleep beyond the sea; all of them 
friends. 

John Masefield, in one of his poems 
on the war, has said: — 

44 If there be any life beyond the grave, 
It must be near the men and things we love, 
Some power of quick suggestion how to save, 
Touching the living soul as from above. 

44 An influence from the earth from those dead 
hearts 
So passionate once, so deep, so truly kind, 
That in the living child the spirit starts, 
Feeling companioned still, not left behind." 

George Eliot wrote, "What makes 
life dreary is the want of motive." She 

57 



LIVING FOR THE FUTURE 

might have added that the want of mo- 
tive in the popular conception of immor- 
tality makes it even drearier than life. 
Her own adequate motive for this world 
was duty for duty's sake, duty viewed 
as self-conquest, self-renunciation, re- 
sistance to instinct and desire; and for 
the next world she hoped, rejecting as 
she did the definitely personal immor- 
tality of the Christian faith, for a hum- 
ble and indistinguishable voice in that 
which she beautifully called " the choir 
invisible." In her poetic thought the 
dead survive in memory; they are re- 
vived when we remember them and 
are inspired by their example. They 

" live again 
In minds made better by their presence ; live 
In pulses stirred to generosity, 
In deeds of daring rectitude, in scorn 

58 



LIVING FOR THE FUTURE 

For miserable aims that end with self, 

In thoughts sublime that pierce the night like 

stars, 
And with their mild persistence urge man's 

search 
To vaster issues." 

According to such a view the dead, 
though dead indeed, may through mem- 
ory and history yield motives to living 
souls who otherwise might perish of 
inertia. But in a far less vague and un- 
satisfying sense we, who believe in per- 
sonal immortality, may think of the 
future as a time when it may be our 
duty, our privilege, our delight, to give 
back to earth in spiritual energy what 
heaven has given us here. 

To suppose, as we commonly do, that 
such wordless, subtle communication 
from one human spirit to another is im- 
possible, or belongs among the improb- 

59 



LIVING FOR THE FUTURE 

able speculations of poets and mystics, 
is really a very dangerous and radical 
doubt. Our belief in the reality of prayer 
as spiritual communion with the unseen 
might be gravely undermined or de- 
stroyed by a general denial at this point. 
For, so far as we know, it may not 
be the mere omnipotence of God that 
makes him able to communicate im- 
mediately with us through prayer; it 
may be just the fact that he is a spirit. 
Perhaps some of those who lightly 
brush aside the suggestion of telepathy 
among the living, and of any kind of 
spiritual influence of the invisible world 
upon the visible, might think twice 
about it if they perceived that their ob- 
jection, when it is a -priori, verges upon 
materialism, and tends to make prayer 
and worship irrational. 

60 



LIVING FOR THE FUTURE 

Let us admit frankly that there is no 
objective evidence whatever for the 
speculation that the spirits of the dead 
may be near the living, aiding and en- 
couraging them without articulate mes- 
sages. It is only a guess; but, in view 
of all the analogies, not an unwarranted 
guess. Tennyson did not believe in the 
reality of spirit messages, but he wrote, 
in " In Memoriam " : — 

' * Be near me when my light is low, 

When the blood creeps, and the nerves 

prick 
Andjtingle ; and the heart is sick 
And all the wheels of Being slow. 

• ••••• 

" Be near us when we climb or fall ; 

Ye watch like God the rolling hours 
With larger, other eyes than ours, 
To make allowance for us all." 

And if the undying do indeed so watch 

61 



LIVING FOR THE FUTURE 

and guard the living, it must be, as 
Tennyson said, that they " make allow- 
ance for us all." They know our frame; 
they remember that we are dust. 



IX 

We are considering the possible ac- 
tivities of a purely spiritual world, and 
the first that has suggested itself to 
us has been the silent communication 
of spiritual refreshment and energy to 
the living. What other occupations 
may there be in the life of the fu- 
ture ? 

Surely, for one thing, there will be 
the occupation of discovery, the joy of 
finding out that which is new. Robert 
Browning wrote to his wife in that per- 
fect love-poem entitled " By the Fire- 
side," — 

' ' Think, when our one soul understands 
The great Word which makes all things 
new — 

63 



LIVING FOR THE FUTURE 

When earth breaks up and Heaven expands — 

How will the change strike me and you 
In the House not made with hands ? " 

And it was also Browning, who is, even 
more than Tennyson, the poet of im- 
mortality, who wrote of the wonders 
we shall perhaps behold 

'* when there dawns a day 

If not on the homely earth, 
Then yonder, worlds away, 

Where the strange and new have birth, 
And power comes full in play." 

This occupation of discovery is per- 
haps not for all; it is for the young, 
and for those who are young at heart. 
Peter Pan remarked naively, as the 
waters of the lagoon crept up his little 
rock and threatened to sweep him 
away, " To die will be an awfully big 
adventure." The words came naturally 

6 4 



LIVING FOR THE FUTURE 

to the lips of a friend of Peter Pan, 
Charles Frohman, on that fateful May 
afternoon when he stood calmly on the 
sinking deck of the doomed Lusitania. 
"Why fear death ? " he said to a young 
actress who stood beside him. " It is 
the most beautiful adventure of life." 
To him, the man of large enterprise, 
the friend of actors, himself an actor at 
heart, the moment had thrilling dra- 
matic interest. It was what theatrical 
people call "a good curtain." A "good 
curtain" is an ending for one act that 
leaves the spectator stirred by its ade- 
quate climax, but eager for the begin- 
ning of the next act. Charles Froh- 
man's particular work and play in this 
life had been to discover genius. It 
was his profession to discover a girl 
and make out of her a star. Some other 

65 



LIVING FOR THE FUTURE 

man's business is to discover a star and 
make out of it a friend. 

Here is a chemist who will never be 
content until he knows the whole truth 
about the behavior of the atoms within 
the molecule. One such died not long 
ago after a long life of more than four 
score years, mostly spent in college teach- 
ing ; and at the end, as he thought over 
the quiet past and the unknown future, 
he said to those about him, thinking 
perhaps of the students he had been 
used to watch from his window over- 
looking the campus, "Tell them this 
is my commencement day." Having 
received from the University of Life its 
last graduate degree, he proposed to be- 
gin a new career of original research. 

What is the future going to do with 
the restless traveler, who has crossed 

66 



LIVING FOR THE FUTURE 

all the deserts and sailed the seven 
seas, yet hears like Kipling's explorer 
the call of the unknown : — 

'* Something hidden. Go and find it. Go and 
look behind the ranges — 
Something lost behind the ranges. Lost and 
waiting for you. Go ! " 

One cannot help asking in what new 
fields of celestial romance and en- 
deavor such pioneering spirits will con- 
tinue their great adventure. Stevenson 
has given us in the "Requiem" his 
thought of the ultimate content: — 

u Home is the sailor, home from sea, 
And the hunter home from the hill." 

That is a beautiful thought for all 
whose wandering has been only exile. 
Stevenson was a landsman at heart, and 
it is well that he wanders no more. 
But many of the old vikings preferred 

6 7 



LIVING FOR THE FUTURE 

the sea-burial to the cairn upon the hill. 
Captain Scott sleeps better beneath the 
frozen ground of his Antarctic new- 
found-land than he could even in an 
English churchyard. But upon what 
strange seas shall his soul discover God 
anew, as the great stars circle forever 
about his southern pole ? Where sails 
Columbus now? Raleigh and Drake, 
Sir John Franklin, David Living- 
stone — what heavenly frontiers have 
they not explored? It is vain to seek 
for Ulysses among the home-keeping 
ghosts of Hades. He is not there; he 
is still afloat, where Dante and Tenny- 
son have sighted him, sailing toward 
the setting sun : — 

' ' It may be that the gulfs will wash us down ; 
It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles, 
And see the great Achilles, whom we knew." 

68 



LIVING FOR THE FUTURE 

Who would condemn the Happy 
Warrior to the punishment of eternal 
peace, or consign the untiring student 
of the stars, the molecules, the crystals, 
or the cells, to a paralyzed heaven of 
completed knowledge? We are pretty 
deep in the mazes of unprofitable specu- 
lation when we begin to inquire what 
there will be left to discover after the 
first surprises of the future life are over. 
But if anything is sure, on the basis of 
analogy and reasonable inference, it is 
that heaven will not be like the morning 
after Christmas, when all the toys have 
lost their novelty and are laid away. We 
hope and believe that it will not be like 
the end of the play, when the curtain 
falls and the garish house-lights shutout 
our vanished dream. If life be illusion, 
and death the door to a dull and final 

6 9 



LIVING FOR THE FUTURE 

reality, some of us would prefer to carry 
the illusion with us into oblivion. Better 
to fail, better to forget, than suddenly to 
know all and never to learn any more. 
One would rather watch forever beside 
the Sphinx amid the desert sands than 
to be told the answer to her riddle, if 
that answer explained everything. For 
man is a question rather than an answer; 
and his immortality must be something 
more than a reply. 

One sometimes thinks we know too 
much rather than too little here; the 
wisest of men set a child in the midst of 
his disciples. Perhaps it is because we 
know too much — too much that is only 
half true, or not true at all, that we spend 
our years as a tale that is told. Life 
grows dreary because it grows uninter- 
esting. We have had our look behind 

70 



LIVING FOR THE FUTURE 

the scenes, and tire of the play because 
we cannot forget the painted canvas and 
the ropes. I am not at all sure that the 
Greeks were not right about it when 
they invented Lethe, the waters of for- 
getfulness. Perhaps a cool bath of ob- 
livion for the worldly-wise, the disil- 
lusioned, the blase*, would not be a bad 
thing after all. 

But however that maybe, surely those 
who have never lost their eager curios- 
ity, never have ceased to be seekers 
after the unknown, may go right on dis- 
covering truth the moment they enter 
the Elysiari Fields. And it will take a 
long time to discover it all. Tennyson 
may study his "crannied flower" long 
and earnestly before he fully knows 
u what God and man is." William Blake 
as a mortal may " see the world in a 

1} 



LIVING FOR THE FUTURE 

grain of sand, and a heaven in a wild 
flower." But Blake the immortal will 
hardly even yet " hold infinity in the 
palm of his hand, and eternity in an 
hour." Children in heaven as on earth 
will probably go on searching for the 
end of the rainbow. We have to grow 
up to discover the beautiful fact that the 
rainbow has no end. 

If heaven does not provide tasks for 
our explorers, our scientists, our engi- 
neers, our captains of industry, some of 
them at least will set to work to make 
work. They will invent something use- 
ful to do. Dante had no occupation for 
the saints in Paradise more exciting 
than debates about scholastic theology 
with mediaeval ecclesiastics. But talk 
is not work; it can hardly be called dis- 
covery, though the renewal of earthly 

72 



LIVING FOR THE FUTURE 

acquaintance and the making of new 
friends may, as hereinafter suggested, be 
among the principal occupations of the 
future life. What discoveries in the realm 
of what we call nature that future may 
permit, what activities in the investiga- 
tion and control of force, we cannot even 
conjecture* 



X 

The art of the ultimate future is for 
artists to imagine. Browning has shown 
us Abt Vogler dreaming of the music 
of the future. Kipling has given us his 
quaint vision of that spacious studio 
where all the immortal painters of the 
world's academies shall gather to paint 
what they choose in the way they 
like. 



" Those that were good shall be happy : they 

shall sit in a golden chair ; 
They shall splash at a ten-league canvas with 

brushes of comet's hair ; 
They shall find real saints to draw from — 

Magdalene, Peter, and Paul ; 
They shall work for an age at a sitting, and 

never be tired at all. 

74 



LIVING FOR THE FUTURE 

M And only the Master shall praise us, and only 

the Master shall blame ; 
And no one shall work for money, and no one 

shall work for fame. 
But each, for the joy of the working, and each, 

in his separate star, 
Shall draw the Thing as he sees It, for the 

God of Things as They are." 

Thus we may at least conceive that 
those who have tried here to represent 
beauty will try there to work with beauty 
itself. The musician may work with har- 
monies impossible for the imperfect in- 
struments of this world. The artist may 
draw as with the cunning finger of the 
frost, and paint with the very colors of 
the sunset. There will perhaps be less 
copying and more creating. The poet 
will become once more, as he was when 
Greece was young, the "maker." St. 
James tells his early Christian readers 

75 



LIVING FOR THE FUTURE 

that they are to be "poets of the Logos," 
or, as we more commonly hear it, " doers 
of the word, not hearers only." Dead 
poets who have done with words may 
help more beautifully, more subtly than 
others to reveal that Word which was 
in the beginning. Shelley wrote of the 
vanished spirit of John Keats, — 

' ' He is a portion of that loveliness 
Which once he made more lovely." 

Celestial architecture figures largely 
in the quaint visions of the Hebrew 
Ezekiel and the Christian John; but 
one fancies they hardly realized that 
souls need neither roofs nor walls. 
Architecture is the art of transfiguring 
the human need for shelter. In the fu- 
ture, like all other arts, it must become 
pure symbolism. And this will be no 

7 6 



LIVING FOR THE FUTURE 

loss but a gain. For psychology teaches 
us that not in the external world but 
within the mind are built all those 
myriad forms of beauty, in form and 
light and color and sound, of which our 
earthly arts give us back but faint re- 
flections. Beauty has its objective basis 
in the symmetries of nature, as music 
has its basis in the mathematical ratios 
of tones; but the symmetries and the 
ratios themselves are subjectively per- 
ceived as well as enjoyed. When the 
time comes that the soul works alto- 
gether in the realm of the ideal, unham- 
pered by poor materials and imperfect 
tools, the arts, which have so long sub- 
limely baffled man, will at last express 
him and reveal his Maker. 

Imagination pauses here, but it does 
not admit the possibility of a spiritual 

77 



LIVING FOR THE FUTURE 

world in which the master spirits be- 
come the slaves of an eternal paralyz- 
ing calm. " What 's come to perfection 
perishes." There is a touching tribute 
of Matthew Arnold to his father, Thomas 
Arnold of Rugby, in the lines enti- 
tled " Rugby Chapel." He voices this 
thought, that there are souls that can- 
not be happy without endeavor: — 

" O strong soul, by what shore 
Tarriest thou now ? For that force, 
Surely, has not been left vain ! 
Somewhere, surely, afar, 
In the sounding labor-house vast 
Of being, is practised that strength, 
Zealous, beneficent, firm." a 



XI 

On the other hand, discovery is not the 
usual occupation of mankind. Abound- 
ing energy that would be punished by 
idleness is not so common that we can 
shape our thought of the future prima- 
rily by it. Not all the good men love 
work so much that they do not gladly 
lay them down to sleep. There comes 
a time when all we want is just to get 
home and get to bed. There is a deep 
beauty in the solemn words of the an- 
cient requiem, 

" Eternal rest give unto them, O Lord, 
And may perpetual light shine ever on them." 

How many folded hands have we all 
seen in our time that seemed content 

79 



LIVING FOR THE FUTURE 

to be folded forever; how many fast 
closed eyes that seemed to have seen 
enough. Rest, the long rest of God's 
long Sabbath, seemed all that they could 
have wished. As the Earl of Kent said 
of the dying Lear,~ 

44 O let him pass ! He hates him 
That would upon the rack of this tough world 
Stretch him out longer," 

When we think of the young and the 
daring, whose great adventure has been 
transferred to other and broader fields, 
we are not to forget the weary who 
wait for release "as a servant that ear- 
nestly desireth the shadow." Browning, 
in his "Old Pictures in Florence," voices 
this hesitation between a heaven of 
vaster enterprise and a heaven of re- 
pose:— 



80 



LIVING FOR THE FUTURE 

" There's a fancy some lean to and others hate — 
That, when this life is ended, begins 
New work for the soul in another state, 
Where it strives and gets weary, loses and 
wins; 
Where the strong and the weak, this world's 
congeries, 
Repeat in large what they practised in small, 
Through life after life in unlimited series ; 
Only the scale's to be changed, that's all. 

" Yet I hardly know. When a soul has seen 
By the means of Evil that Good is best, 
And, through earth and its noise, what is 
heaven's serene, ■— 
When our faith in the same has stood the 
test — 
Why, the child grown man, you burn the rod, 

The uses of labor are surely done ; 
There remaineth a rest for the people of God : 
And I have had troubles enough, for one." 

This is exceptional rather than char- 
acteristic in Browning, who is the poet 
of the active heaven ; but many other 



LIVING FOR THE FUTURE 

poets have presented to us the contrast 
between the strenuous life of this world 
and the future life of surcease. Let us 
face life cheerfully, even as a long and 
unrewarding task, they say, if only we 
may view death as a long repose. Chris- 
tina Rossetti, for example, gives utter- 
ance in lines of haunting beauty to this 
promise of the rest that comes with the 
shadow: — 

" Does the road wind up-hill all the way? 
Yes, to the very end. 
^YVill the day's journey take the whole long 
day? 
From morn to night, my friend. 

<* But is there for the night a resting-place? 

A roof for when the slow, dark hours begin. 
May not the darkness hide it from my face ? 
You cannot miss that inn. 

" Shall I meet other wayfarers at night? 
Those who have gone before. 

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LIVING FOR THE FUTURE 

Then must I knock, or call when just in sight ? 
They will not keep you standing at that 
door. 

" Shall I find comfort, travel-sore and weak? 
Of labor you shall find the sum. 
Will there be beds for me and all who seek? 
Yea, beds for all who come." 

While, therefore, we have reason to 
suppose that the future life will be in 
some degree active, at least for those 
for whom activity is the highest good, 
we have no need to fear the forcing of 
labor upon the weary, or of discovery 
and adventure upon the perplexed and 
bewildered soul. For the vast majority 
of mankind, work in this world means 
a dull routine in which the soul can 
have little share; and for them it is not 
easy to conceive of an active future 
which can be anything but a perpetua- 

83 



LIVING FOR THE FUTURE 

tion of irksome toil. All such may rest 
in the conviction that the future will 
provide the highest good for each and 
all. " He giveth unto his beloved sleep." 



XII 

Arising naturally out of the thought 
of the future as giving unbounded op- 
portunities for discovery comes the oc- 
cupation of discovering old friends, of 
renewing the severed ties of earthly 
love and friendship, and of learning to 
know one another better than earthly 
barriers permit. This is what most of 
us think of first when our minds turn 
with an increasing sense of nearness to 
the place where so many that were 
closest to us have preceded us. It was 
not mentioned first, because it seemed 
better to begin by trying to get a cer- 
tain sense of reality and variety into our 
thought of the future before turning to 
this purely personal interest. But it 

85 



LIVING FOR THE FUTURE 

comes up now, and at once we are con- 
fronted by many perplexities. 

We must assume some kind and de- 
gree of recognition as a necessary infer- 
ence from our starting-point, personal 
immortality. Persons cannot perma- 
nently live alone; if they do, they cease 
to be in the largest sense persons. We 
are social beings. Life as we know it is 
so intricate, so complex an interweaving 
of human destinies, that so far as we 
can conceive, the threads can never be 
wholly disentangled. 
f A future world in which you and I 
are individually conscious of ourselves 
and of God, but just as unconscious as 
we are now of the presence all around 
us of invisible spiritual beings, would 
hardly be personal immortality. For 
personality requires other persons in 

86 



LIVING FOR THE FUTURE 

order to realize and to express itself; 
and life, of which immortality is only the 
superlative degree, means adjustment 
to environment. The raising of barriers 
between personalities is in so far a limi- 
tation which, if made absolute, as for 
example by insanity, brings the paraly- 
sis, the apparent negation, of what we 
call the person. We say of such an un- 
fortunate, " He is not himself." Personal 
immortality, then, must carry with it, 
not a multiplication but a removal of 
barriers. Some have thought of heaven 
as the world where virtue is instantly 
recognized by any one that sees it. 
"Then shall I know even as also I am 
known." 

Apparently some kind of mutual rec- 
ognition of persons in a spiritual world 
is a necessary corollary of personal im- 

8 7 



LIVING FOR THE FUTURE 

mortality. But it is a very different ques- 
tion whether we shall find it any easier 
to recognize those we have known in 
the earthly life than to learn to know 
the passing stranger. What will be the 
signs by which soul greets soul ? Do 
you know your friend so well that if you 
could read his heart you would know 
him without the familiar features, the 
friendly smile, the long-remembered 
voice? There are those who suppose, 
like the spiritualists, that we shall some- 
how recognize our loved ones in the 
future world by a kind of retained vis- 
ual image of their personal appearance, 
which will remain associated with the 
spirit after its departure from the body. 
Why should we pause upon a point so 
entirely beyond even possible conjec- 
ture? You think of your friend as you 

88 



LIVING FOR THE FUTURE 

last saw him, years before he died, and 
perhaps expect to know him by a sort 
of spiritual image of a man in the vigor 
of youth. But there are others for whom 
the image stamped upon memory is the 
lovely serenity of declining years, the 
whitening hair, the deeply lined face, 
the failing strength. It was so they knew 
him, so they loved him, so only that 
they would recognize him if spirits are 
to be known by such signs. 

These speculations raise at once so 
many incongruous and absurd conse- 
quences that the healthy mind is apt to 
brush aside the whole inquiry as inane. 
Let us pass on, with the remark that if 
there be any future life, the lives that 
were really linked here by anything more 
than the accidents of temporary associ- 
ation will somehow find each other out 

8 9 



LIVING FOR THE FUTURE 

I do not feel sure they will all be 
discovered easily. One can conceive 
of many a half-formed soul hurried into 
eternity and searching long for one whose 
real life had been infinitely distant from 
his own, though they had passed their 
years side by side. When Alcestis went 
for the second and last time to wander 
like some white vestal virgin in the gar- 
dens of Proserpine, and there was no 
Hercules to bring her back, Admetus 
must have been a long time finding her. 
He may not have known her when they 
passed ; but she would have known him, 
and taken pity on him. Since 1914 there 
must have been many a rough Tommy 
Atkins, many a French chasseur, many 
a German gunner, whose simple, sinful, 
loyal soul has risen suddenly from the 
screaming, cursing earth to the land 

90 



LIVING FOR THE FUTURE' 

where all good soldiers go, who will 
yet be a long time finding his mother, 
his sweetheart, when they come. Per- 
haps the church knew very well what 
it was about when it introduced the 
doctrine of purgatory. 

Indeed, one wonders whether any but 
the closest and most spiritual ties, ties 
rare or unknown in many lives that are 
lived out here both in cottage and in 
mansion, can bridge the gulf that parts 
us all. For, while we like to talk about 
the coming removal of barriers, and the 
probability of some kind of future rec- 
ognition, there is no use in denying that 
there are mysterious and unfathomable 
spaces between soul and soul. They are 
bridged here — or seem to be — by the 
easy and fallacious intimacies of com- 
mon life. To have sat side by side, to 

9 1 



LIVING FOR THE FUTURE 

have walked together, to have been 
sheltered by the same roof, fed from the 
same table, warmed by the same fire 
— these seem more than they are. Fel- 
lowship is something more than to lodge 
in the same hotel. To suppose that all 
who have been associated here by the 
ties of business or of kinship will meet 
in eternity would be as foolish as to sup- 
pose that all the students who now sit 
together in the classroom will find one 
another congenial twenty years after 
graduation. 

The real ties may be those deep nat- 
ural affinities that figure in poetry and 
romance. Quite as often they are the 
growth of long years of mutual sacri- 
fice and communion, of deliberate and 
sometimes difficult sharing and helping, 
of groundless hopes and useless fears. 

92 



LIVING FOR THE FUTURE 

They are knit together by the long chain 
of joys and sorrows, beginnings and ends. 
They begin in some common thrill at 
dawn, some hand in hand at sunset; and 
they lead to twilight together, and dark- 
ness severed only by those dreams which 
cannot be told. Such comrades, though 
their paths seem always a little apart, 
come somehow to be one at last; for 
parallel lines meet at infinity. 

Recognition in the future life will 
not be a cheap, easy prologue to heaven. 
It will not be over in an hour, or an 
age. There will be many a quest 
wherein he who started gayly forth to 
find his lady will wander long before 
he finds what he had not sought — the 
Holy Grail, whereof she is now a hum- 
ble minister. You thought you knew 
your brother, your business partner, 

93 



LIVING FOR THE FUTURE 

your college mate, and look for him 
among the unready crowd about the 
gates; but when you find him, he is 
with one so holy that you see only the 
shining of his face. 

And what of those who die in youth ? 
Do they grow up in heaven ? It is 
hard to think there are no children 
there, and most of us refuse to believe 
it. More likely many of those who en- 
tered that unseen world in early life 
remain always children, children in 
happy heart and simple faith, though 
growing in wisdom and in grace. Shall 
we see them as they were, or as they 
might have been? Are the parents to 
expect a, welcome from one who has 
still his proud little secrets to confide, 
his shy and adorable evasions of just 
praise, his delight in being taken for 

94 



LIVING FOR THE FUTURE 

granted as a comrade? Or will there 
be a wise man-soul waiting there, with 
fulfillment written where promise was 
before ? Is the little one that vanished 
with the violets to be still the eager 
child of spring, or will she walk sedately 
and be queen of the summer? Who 
knows? And who will not know soon? 



XIII 

Recognition in the future can hardly 
be limited to those spirits whom we 
have chanced to be acquainted with 
here. A fascinating subject of fanciful 
speculation in all ages has been the pos- 
sibility of knowing and learning from 
the great dead of all the past, I need 
only refer you to the " Divine Comedy " 
for innumerable illustrations of it. Peter, 
on the mount of transfiguration, behold- 
ing the spirits of Moses and Elijah 
talking with his Master, eagerly pro- 
posed a longer stay; he would gladly 
have talked a while himself with those 
ancient worthies, for they had seen a 
good deal of life in their day. Every 
one of us has his heroes jn history, in 

9 6 



LIVING FOR THE FUTURE 

literature, in the long honor roll of 
sages and martyrs and saints. If you 
were offered the chance to choose just 
five names out of all the good and the 
wise whose absent souls have been 
your guides, through those golden 
words and deeds which they have left 
behind, and to talk with each but a 
single hour, would not that hour be 
worth a year of life? It is a trite say- 
ing that as a rule those who go as 
strangers to visit great men in this 
world come away disappointed. Emer- 
son explains this; he says: "The young 
scholar fancies it happiness enough to 
live with people who can give an inside 
to the world; without reflecting that 
they are prisoners, too, of their own 
thought, and cannot apply themselves 
to yours." 

97 



LIVING FOR THE FUTURE 

The imperfect sympathies and the 
limited time that make hero-worship 
at close range a dangerous amusement 
in this life can hardly survive in the 
future. Here surely discover}'' as an 
occupation for eternity will have its 
widest scope. If it should take us un- 
numbered years really to know the 
hearts of those few we have thought we 
knew already, what can be said of the 
prospect opened here? Mankind will 
never cease to be interesting, and a 
heaven in which there are all kinds of 
people can never grow dull. Ennui is 
not to be thought of in a world where 
Chaucer and Shakespeare and Mark 
Twain can be just as happy as St. Au- 
gustine and John Wesley. Probably the 
one sort may never fully appreciate the 
other even in heaven, but fortunate no- 

9 8 



LIVING FOR THE FUTURE 

bodies like ourselves can enjoy them 
all. If one is ever tempted to think that 
we must some day get to an end of our 
resources, it is pleasant to remember 
that all the wisdom, all the wit, all the 
beauty and bravery of this world, as 
well as all its saintliness, must go on 
growing and shining forever if the souls 
of men do really live beyond the grave. 
(And if they do not, nothing matters 
after all, for we shall never know it.) 



XIV 



Another occupation of the future 
may be the education of newly risen 
souls. Have you ever tried to imagine 
what it must mean, on the hypothesis 
of immortality, that during the great 
war millions of young men have been 
hurried out of this world into the pres- 
ence of God? They were without any 
of that discipline of the spirit that life 
itself unfailingly imparts. Many of them 
had never learned, either by victory or 
by defeat, how really to be men, save 
in such ways as legs and arms and 
brains can be called men, until they are 
shot to pieces. Flesh they knew, and 
loved it, but not too well; blood they 
knew, and spilled it — for a flag; but 

ioo 



LIVING FOR THE FUTURE 

spirit they knew not, and spirit they are 
now, or nothing. If anything is left of 
those boys except a vast decay, it must 
be a vast ignorance, a blank dismay, an 
unformed hope, an unanswered ques- 
tion. Who is to teach those murdered 
soldiers, whose only memorial now is 
a helmet on a rude cross ? Who is to 
show them how the great war can have 
brought them into a great but unknown 
peace ? 

Are there not guides that wait above 
the fields of France ? Has God no scouts, 
no sentries posted at his frontiers ? Per- 
haps the barren plains this side of the 
great divide are paced by the lonely 
horsemen of the border patrol. They 
know no more of heaven than just to 
give the first salute, and to point out 
the road across the valley of the shadow. 

101 



LIVING FOR THE FUTURE 

There is among them a Roman centu- 
rion who watched the darkness cover 
Calvary. There are swarthy troopers 
of Custer's band and Sheridan's brigade. 
There are the leaders of lost causes, 
captains of many a forlorn hope, and the 
forgotten soldiers of many wars. They 
have been saved so as by fire; and their 
souls still wait, through all this desolating 
celestial peace, for one more chance to 
strike a blow for some cause which 
they deeply love, and dimly understand. 
And meanwhile, they can train the raw 
recruits who are ever rushing forth from 
the cannon smoke and the horrid din of 
battle. 

And when we are thinking of the edu- 
cation of new souls, what of the chil- 
dren ? God will always need some very 
kind teachers in his kindergarten, for 

102 



LIVING FOR THE FUTURE 

there is a new class every day. Are 
there not mothers waiting to meet all 
the little children that come crying into 
this world? And shall there not be 
mothers to meet those that go so quietly 
and trustfully out of it? There are some 
women in heaven that could never 
stand it to see a lost child looking for 
the way home; they would run to take 
his little hand and lead him up to God. 
You don't have to prove that; you know 
it. 

Would you not love to stand there 
watching for the soul that needs you; 
the weakness that needs your strength, 
the weariness that needs your peace, 
the apprehension that your fuller know- 
ledge can best remove? Perhaps we 
shall all be teachers in heaven. The 
least learned of us can somehow keep 

103 



LIVING FOR THE FUTURE 

a day or two ahead of the freshman 
class; and none of our pupils will ever 
forget us when they have learned what 
little we can teach. 



XV 

By such an imaginative survey of 
some of the possible occupations of the 
future life we have perhaps been led to 
consider that life as having more points 
of contact with the present than we had 
supposed. We have distinguished five 
activities which seem not only possible 
but probable in a world of immortal 
spirits. They are, first, silent influence 
for good upon the living; second, the 
discovery of new truth and new beauty 
in the universe of which heaven is only 
the spiritual aspect' — the study of celes- 
tial philosophy and science and art, pur- 
sued for the sheer joy of knowing and 
of doing, by those to whom learning or 
action is indispensable to full self-realiz- 

io5 



LIVING FOR THE FUTURE 

ation; third, the renewal of earthly ties 
of love andfriendship ; fourth, the making 
of new friends; and fifth, the education of 
novices. It would not be difficult to add 
further illustrations of the general prop- 
osition that the future life is a life of 
progress, of change, of growth, of multi- 
plying contacts and sympathies with the 
infinite world of the human as well as 
of the divine. 

That such inherently spiritual activi- 
ties as have been vaguely sketched can 
be really separated from the Christian 
view of the future life is obviously im- 
possible. But by avoiding the biblical 
terminology, by considering what one 
may perhaps inaccurately call the secu- 
lar aspects of immortality, we gain per- 
haps a certain freshness in the point of 
view, which may appeal to some for 

1 06 



LIVING FOR THE FUTURE 

whom matters of faith are quite beyond 
the realm of the imagination. We may 
even keep this unusual attitude a little 
longer, while we inquire what the conse- 
quences of such speculations are for our 
present life. 

Our very title is a challenge. It is 
meant to be a challenge. Living for the 
future — with what scorn the practical 
man is apt to receive such a suggestion, 
when he comprehends that the future 
we are talking about is the future beyond 
the grave. What we need, he tells us, 
is more living for the present, or for the 
immediate future, and then the distant 
future will take care of itself. If there is 
to be any living for the future, he adds, 
it ought to be mostly that far-sighted 
morality which may be described as 
living for the next generation. We are 

107 



LIVING FOR THE FUTURE 

sure to be accused of having reached, 
by a different path from that of the older 
theologians, an other- worldliness which 
is not only useless but even harmful to 
social progress. 

There is enough truth in the criticism 
to keep us from any tendency toward 
over-emphasis of a side of truth which 
most of the world altogether neglects. 
It is true that to allow one's mind to 
dwell over much on curious specula- 
tions about the nature of immortality is 
likely to encourage indifference to the 
reality and the importance of those bat- 
tles which we ought now to wage for 
the morality, the justice, the human 
brotherhood of the present world. Our 
business just now is to play the game, 
while we have a chance. Browning has 
given us, in his " Epistle of Karshish " 

1 08 



LIVING FOR THE FUTURE 

concerning Lazarus of Bethany, a vivid 
picture of the effect upon the human 
mind of an unveiled vision of eternity; 
the daze, the lack of perspective, the 
dreamy and mystical outlook on a ma- 
terial world no longer regarded as su- 
premely important: — 

u Heaven opened to a soul while yet on earth, 
Earth forced on a soul's use while seeing ; 
heaven." 

The poems of William Blake and of 
Emily Dickinson are a sufficient illustra- 
tion both of the strange, unearthly beauty 
of a life taken possession of by the power 
of the world to come, and of the utter 
inability of such a life to enter into the 
struggles of its own generation. Poets 
and prophets may be pardoned if some- 
times they see the goal so clearly that 
they neglect the means; but the rest of 

109 



LIVING FOR THE FUTURE 

mankind will do well to remember that 
a little duty done is better than a great 
ideal unapproaehed. " Whatsoever thy 
hand findeth to do, do it with thy might" 
is good advice for this world, though it 
is the advice of an agnostic Hebrew 
philosopher who had no place in his 
philosophy for the ethics of immor- 
tality. Living for the present, working 
for proximate ends, seeking to raise the 
general level of human welfare and hap- 
piness an inch or two by practicable 
means, is rightly esteemed by the ma- 
jority of thoughtful men to be the best 
way for society to prepare for whatever 
heaven may some day be realized on 
earth. 



XVI 

But when all that is said, we have a 
haunting consciousness thatwhat is true 
for society is not always enough to sat- 
isfy the individual heart. Your reform 
may be worked out twenty, thirty, forty 
years from now, but where shall you be 
then? Your scheme for the uplifting of 
the race may some day triumph, but 
what is your own outlook into that in- 
visible world where too many of the 
brightest and best have already gone 
before their time ? 

The philosophy of living for the pres- 
ent, in the higher and more unselfish 
sense, seems entirely adequate in the 
case of those fortunate men and women 
who live out the full span of human life, 

in 



LIVING FOR THE FUTURE 

and fill it with happy and successful and 
enduring labor for others. But there are 
more chances of failure than of success 
for the individual in his attempts to con- 
tribute to social progress. A wrong con- 
ception of the problem, misguided effort, 
external hindrances, a premature or a 
belated start, a lack of resources, the 
interruptions due to physical limitations, 
the untimely end of a long, unequal 
struggle — these make up the history of 
many a noble and (as we say) ineffec- 
tive life. As we grow older, and per- 
ceive in how small a proportion of the 
worthier lives about us it can be said 
that "the end crowns the work," we are 
moved, not to pessimism, but to a more 
transcendent faith; a faith that climbs 
over failure and sees the ultimate suc- 
cess, not alone for the many, but for 

112 



LIVING FOR THE FUTURE 

the very one who tried and seemed to 
fail. 

The fact is, that none of us is really 
satisfied, when we first realize that our 
own larger life-plan is sure to fail, by the 
assurance that some one else in distant 
years will achieve what we attempted, 
that the thing itself will somehow be 
brought to pass. That is all right for 
society, but not all right for us; not 
enough to satisfy us as a final and ade- 
quate motive for a victorious life. The 
physician who gives his life as a sacrifice 
to demonstrate the cause of a mysteri- 
ous disease, or to help find a remedy for 
it, is hailed as a true martyr of science; 
he has his reward. But what of that 
much larger number who take equal 
risks and meet an equally untimely end 
through some stupid accident, with no 

ii3 



LIVING FOR THE FUTURE 

useful result that either they or society 
can perceive? They need immortality 
to justify life; they need the future to 
explain the present. 

Living for the future is no coward's 
philosophy. It is not an ingenious and 
pious scheme for evading present duty, 
or explaining away one's failures. Rather 
is it the inspiration of the weak, the 
crown and culmination of the strong 
man's race. The very mention of it 
brings the sting of shame to the indo- 
lent and selfish, of fear to the sensual. 
Even those who gee most clearly and 
grasp most eagerly the splendid oppor- 
tunities of the present come sooner or 
later to the point where they too realize 
that the} T have all along been living for 
the future, and have missed something 
because they did not know it before. 

114 



LIVING FOR THE FUTURE 

No, we cannot escape the lure of eter- 
nity. We cannot shut out its all too 
dazzling light. It flashes upon us in some 
sudden splendor of the morning. It sets 
us dreaming in broad daylight. Shelley, 
in his "Adonais," has told us how 

" Life, like a dome of many-colored glass, 
Stains the white radiance of eternity.' ' 

But there are times when all the glow- 
ing colors of the spectrum, the light 
and the dark, the solemn and the gay, 
are fused for an instant by our keener 
sense, and we are aware of the invisible 
sun beyond. As Emily Dickinson puts 
it: — 

u Our lives are Swiss, — 
So still, so cool, 
Till, some odd afternoon, 
The Alps neglect their curtains, 
And we look farther on. 

"5 



LIVING FOR THE FUTURE 

*' Italy stands the other side, 

While, like a guard between, 
The solemn Alps, 
The siren Alps, 

Forever intervene ! " 

It was Browning's Bishop Blougram, 
the worldly and half-cynical ecclesiastic, 
who told his agnostic companion why 
we cannot permanently keep our doubts 
untouched by faith : — 

44 Just when we are safest, there 's a sunset- 
touch, 
A fancy from a flower-bell, some one's death, 
A chorus-ending from Euripides, 
And that 's enough for fifty hopes and fears 
As old and new at once as nature's self 
To rap and knock and enter in our soul." 

There is a sense, then, in which we 
ought to live for this future, about which 
we know nothing and hope everything. 
Of such preparedness as belongs to 

116 



LIVING FOR THE FUTURE 

the distinctly religious view of life and 
death, it is unnecessary here to speak; 
just because it is so important that every 
one remembers it first when such sub- 
jects are discussed. There are three 
other ways, beside reconciling our wills 
with the divine, by which we may in 
some degree learn how to live without 
a body. These three ways are, to live 
intensely, to live communicatively, and 
to live helpfully. - 



XVII 

First, because of our probable future 
we must learn to live intensely. We 
must pack every day with personality. 
We must give to every task that per- 
mits it as much of ourselves as can be 
put into it. For in the degree in which 
we succeed in becoming most thor- 
oughly ourselves, our best selves, in the 
degree, that is to say, in which the gen- 
eral human stuff in us receives the unique 
stamp of a distinctive personality, just 
so far — and -perhaps no further — we 
begin to have within us the germ of a 
possible personal immortality. 

It is not every day nor every week 
that you can be in any large sense per- 
sonal. You go on for weeks, for months, 

118 



LIVING FOR THE FUTURE 

sometimes for years, mastering a rou- 
tine; and then comes the moment when 
either the routine will master you, or 
there must be a new start, a creative in- 
stant, "a flash of the will that can." 
You live dully, shallowly, shabbily, 
apologetically, through a whole winter; 
and then some fine day winter melts, 
April shines, something stirs within, and 
your soul has its chance. It is perhaps 
the one half-hour in the year when you 
feel as if you might still begin to be 
yourself. For part of one golden after- 
noon your will is free. For a tick of 
the clock you really see things straight. 
It is, for the moment, evident to you 
that your soul lives by these rare intens- 
ities, not of mere sentiment or empty 
aspiration, but of deep resolve and im- 
mediate perception of truth. Instead of 

119 



LIVING FOR THE FUTURE 

regretting now, as you have been used 
to do, that such moments are so rare, 
and getting rarer every year, you rejoice 
that they are still so intense; that life is 
still so rich, the world so full of beauty; 
the past so bright, the present so alluring, 
the future so full of wonder. 

" And I have felt 
A presence that disturbs me with the joy 
Of elevated thoughts ; a sense sublime 
Of something far more deeply interfused, 
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, 
And the round ocean and the living air, 
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man ; 
A motion and a spirit, that impels 
All thinking things, all objects of all thought, 
And rolls through all things." 

Now the lesson of our study of the 
future is that there is a sense in which 
what we are at such moments is the only 
true self. Accordingly as we then rise 

1 20 



LIVING FOR THE FUTURE 

or fall, so the vast colorless spaces of 
ordinary life are elevated into necessary 
though uninteresting duty, or depressed 
into dull failure and unperceived decay. 
They are the "hours of insight" in which 
must be willed those tasks which " can 
be through hours of gloom fulfilled." 

These moments of intensity, when 
personality can be raised to a higher 
power, are seldom to be had by our 
seeking. We may indeed cultivate, by 
such means as our particular form of re- 
ligion or of philosophy may suggest/the 
state of mind in which this temporary 
escape from the prison of the common- 
place seems possible. Prayer accom- 
plishes for one what music does for an- 
other; a walk in the autumn woods, a 
quiet afternoon beside the sea, a long 
talk before an open fire — all these may 

121 



LIVING FOR THE FUTURE 

help. They have this in common, that 
they quiet the restless, imperious voices 
of the petty concerns of life, and make 
it possible for us to listen to wisdom 
and destiny. But for the most part the 
hours of insight come and go without 
our calling. Our business is to recognize 
them when they do come, and turn them 
to account. This is Browning's doctrine 
of the critical moments of life, as ex- 
pressed, for example, in these lines: — 

" How the world is made for each of us ! 

How all we perceive and know in it 
Tends to some moment's product thus, 

When a soul declares itself — to wit, 
By its fruit — the thing it does ! " 

The intenser living that can be called 
living for the future is assuredly not that 
glorified selfishness of which modern 
literature is full, the intense desire and 

122 



LIVING FOR THE FUTURE 

resolve to get what we want regardless 
of consequences. A certain type of con- 
temporary verse and fiction tries to throw 
a glamour over that particularly obnox- 
ious sort of adultery and lawlessness in 
general that is called " living one's own 
life." Provided that the hero or heroine 
is able to feel individual desire so in- 
tensely as to be indifferent to the desires 
or the rights of anybody else, the matter 
is regarded as somehow raised above the 
moral law by its dramatic appeal. Natu- 
rally we must guard our principle of in- 
tensity against all such anti-social senti- 
mentalism. The only intensity that can 
prepare us for a spiritual future is the 
intensity of the best. 



XVIII 

And again, if we are to gain anything 
in fitness for a world where spirits dwell 
at once together and apart, we must live 
communicatively. Our intensity must 
not be entirely self-centered and con- 
cealed. We must share. We must re- 
veal our best. We must, once in a while, 
speak out. It is true, as we found reason 
earlier in this discussion to believe, that 
there ought to be some things we feel 
and do not tell. That natural reticence 
which prompts us to say least when the 
deepest truth is most deeply appre- 
hended is not to be lightly resisted. It 
is the modesty of the soul, the chastity 
of the inner life. The best people we 
know are good enough not to talk too 

124 



LIVING FOR THE FUTURE 

much, especially about goodness. Per- 
haps it is not altogether a misfortune 
that the present generation fears cant 
more than it fears the devil; for that 
brazen counterfeit known as cant has 
alwa}'s been the devil's most effectual 
means of keeping gold coin out of circu- 
lation. 

But this world is so full of false proph- 
ets and deluding dreams that when you 
are sure, you had better tell some one else 
who is sure — just to seethe answering 
light in his eye. And then you are to 
risk your peace of mind by telling some 
one who is not sure, and does not want 
to be sure. There will be no light in his 
eye: that is why you tell him. He, poor 
soul, does not know he needs what you 
have to give; but you know you need to 
give it. A suppressed truth is a danger- 

125 



LIVING FOR THE FUTURE 

ous thing; it may spoil on your hands 
before you can use it; or it may explode 
when too much compressed by your 
careful secrecy; or it may altogether 
cease to be a truth for you and turn out 
a lie, to your confusion and dismay. 

And when you do try to give away 
a real truth, whether you find that no- 
body wants it, or that the crowd is 
clamoring for it, in either case you can- 
not after all really give it away. It will 
not leave you. You give it and keep it 
too — like happiness, and love, and all 
other eternal things. 

This duty to live communicatively, 
to reveal and to share whatever spark of 
the divine fire may have found lodgment 
with us, is usually urged on the ground 
of the shortness of life. Richard Watson 
Gilder, for example, voices it thus: — 

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LIVING FOR THE FUTURE 

" This is my creed, 

This be my deed : 
' Hide not thy heart ' ; 

Soon we depart ; 

Mortals are all, 

A breath, then the pall, 

A flash in the dark, 

All's done — stiff and stark ; 

No time for a lie ; 

The truth, and then die ; 

Hide not thy heart. 

" Forth with thy thought; 
Soon 'twill be naught, 
And thou in thy tomb ; 
Now is air, now is room. 
Down with false shame ; 
Reck not of fame ; 
Dread not men's spite ; 
Quench not thy light. 
This be thy creed, 
This be thy deed : 
4 Hide not thy heart.' " 

Such a warning as that derives a just 

solemnity from the fact that, so far as 

127 



LIVING FOR THE FUTURE 

this world is concerned, if we are to 
speak out at all, it must be soon. But 
there is another and less somber aspect 
in which it appears desirable for us to 
learn by practice here that difficult art 
of spiritual communication upon which 
we shall be altogether dependent by 
and by. If we do not learn it here, we 
may learn it there; but perhaps slowly 
and with infinite difficulty. Even with 
lips and tongues and eyes and ears, 
even with the ample resources of hu- 
man speech and the wonderful arts of 
writing and printing, it is a very hard 
thing to transmit a spiritual idea from 
one mind to another. What is it going 
to be when we live in a world where 
there is no other way of transmitting a 
thought than to think it intensely? It 
is said of the stars, — 

128 



LIVING FOR THE FUTURE 

** Day unto day uttereth speech, 

And night unto night showeth knowledge : 
There is no speech nor language ; 
Their voice cannot be heard." 

The stars can talk without words; 
they do it just by shining. Can we? 
And if we cannot now, would it not be 
well to practice a little, while we still 
have the words ? x 

1 Moreover, if it should be our duty or our privi- 
lege in the future life to attempt what the psychic 
researchers think many spirits are trying to do, that 
is, to send thought messages from the other side into 
this world for some wise and good purpose, then how 
enormously important it might be that we should be 
able to share our consciousness with others. Such 
transmission might be expected to require a very high 
electric potential, so to speak, to overcome the vast 
resistance through which it must operate. Many in- 
terested but critical investigators of trance mediums 
and automatic writing are not disposed to regard as 
entirely conclusive against the genuineness of some 
of these phenomena the evident trivialities and inco- 
herences mixed in with the more reasonable and inter- 
esting material. For, they remind us, we must not 
forget the stubborn and refractory medium through 
which a real spirit message, if there be any such thing, 
must have to pass in using any human mind, even one 

129 



LIVING FOR THE FUTURE 

Whether we do or do not take the 
slightest interest in the possibility of 
the communication of thought across 
the borderland between the two worlds, 
we shall certainly need before long all 
our powers of making ourselves under- 
stood by others. 



so sensitive as Mrs. Piper's. It has seemed to them 
that an effort of concentration sufficient to stir a mor- 
tal brain with some vague fragments of a genuine 
message from without might be totally inadequate to 
avoid a large admixture of nonsense from the medi- 
um's own subconscious mind, and perhaps also from 
the subconscious or conscious minds of the sitters ; 
and this without any intentional fraud or interference 
on the medium's part. In fact, they point out, there 
is a certain v presumption that the earlier manifesta- 
tions of genuine psychic phenomena, whether to too 
incredulous or too credulous investigators, would be 
fragmentary and obscure, because of this factor of 
high resistance and inadequate initial force. The an- 
alogies of recent scientific progress in the reinforce- 
ment of very weak electrical currents in long-distance 
telephony, and very slight ether vibrations in wireless 
telegraphy and telephony, show us that this difficulty 
is serious but not insurmountable in the realm of nat- 
ural force. Whether it can ever be conquered in the 
sphere of mind is a question for the next generation. 

I30 



LIVING FOR THE FUTURE 

It may be, of course, that communi- 
cation will be easier, not harder, in the 
future. We were led to think, in con- 
sidering the question of recognition in 
the future, that barriers will there be 
lessened rather than multiplied. It is 
obvious that the polyglot vocal speech 
of earth will be superseded there by 
some other means of communicating 
thought, which may, for all we know, 
be so much simpler and better than 
ours that we shall wonder why we 
ever bothered with the alphabet. But 
the mere communication of the most 
elementary ideas is a very different 
thing from the sharing of spiritual con- 
sciousness which is here under consid- 
eration. 

Every time, therefore, that we suc- 
ceed in overcoming a false fear, a shal- 

131 



LIVING FOR THE FUTURE 

low pride, a natural reticence, and in 
giving out with the personal stamp that 
truth which we have made our own, 
we are preparing for a wider ministry 
here, and perhaps hereafter. The sud- 
denly genuine word in the midst of the 
social small talk, the deliberate writing 
of the neglected letter to an old friend 
in order not to lose the line of com- 
munication, the 'seeking of occasions 
when one may appropriately, though 
not easily, raise serious subjects with 
the casual acquaintance, or even with 
the stranger — these are ways of keep- 
ing alive the spirit of giving away what 
we have no right to keep. 

Yet in all this we are not to forget 
the caution of one who was all his life 
very generous with the things which 
had cost him the most, such as love and 

132 



LIVING FOR THE FUTURE 

truth. The great Teacher said we were 
not to waste our souls on useless speech. 
His words were, " Cast not your pearls 
before swine." 



XIX 

To live for the future is, again, to live 
helpfully. To speak of it sounds trite, 
for here we seem to be merely echoing 
the familiar though lofty teaching of 
ordinary religion and ethics. But in the 
same special sense as that in which we 
have considered the future life as a life 
demanding spiritual intensity and spir- 
itual communication, it must also be a 
life of spiritual helpfulness. Those same 
considerations of intelligent preparation 
for a new state of being which make it 
desirable to learn to be intensely our- 
selves, and to share with others the 
best of our inner life, also demand that 
we turn with fresh interest and zeal to 
the working out of the Golden Rule in 

134 



LIVING FOR THE FUTURE 

the practical problems of daily life. Re- 
ligion teaches us that we should help 
because we have been helped, and be- 
cause all men are our neighbors, our 
brothers. Ethics teaches us that we 
should help because we belong to a 
social order of mutual dependence. The 
philosophy of immortality teaches us 
that we do well to learn now how to 
help, and to find pleasure in helping, 
because that is probably the principal 
occupation of eternity. 

In considering the possible activities 
of a spiritual world, we distinguished 
five: (i) helping the living; (2) dis- 
covering new truth; (3) discovering old 
friends; (4) discovering new friends; 
(5) educating the new comers in heaven. 
The first and the fifth are nothing but 
helping. The discovery of truth and of 

135 



LIVING FOR THE FUTURE 

old and new friends, so far as it is un- 
selfish and not merely curious, depends 
chiefly upon the desire to be of use as 
its motive, and upon sympathy, intel- 
lectual and moral, as its method. 

Further, the other two kinds of prep- 
aration for the future that have just 
been discussed will not amount to much 
unless they are dominated by the spirit 
of helpfulness. For both intensity and 
the ability to communicate one's thought 
are, regarded as coldly intellectual pow- 
ers, within the reach of only a small 
minority of mankind, and perhaps of 
comparatively little value in the spirit- 
ual progress of the race in this world 
or any other. To live intensely by sheer 
force of intellect is possible to one man 
in a thousand; to live intensely by sur- 
rendering oneself unreservedly to the 

136 



LIVING FOR THE FUTURE 

great tides of love that move both the 
heavens and the hearts of men is pos- 
sible to all. 

Agai n, to live communicatively by such 
intellectual concentration as achieves an 
efficient transmission of ideas is after all 
not for the multitude. For most of us, 
then, intensity, in order to be helpful, 
must be intensity of love, not of intel- 
lect. And the life of spiritual sharing, 
of communication, is the life in which 
we learn to understand others, rather 
than try to make them understand us. 

Indeed, the highest helpfulness in this 
world, and perhaps in the next, is help- 
ing other people to be most truly them- 
selves; helping them to express their 
own imperfect thought, and so to grow; 
taking for granted in them a virtue 
which they have by no means shown, 

137 



LIVING FOR THE FUTURE 

and perhaps do not possess, but which 
they are thereby led to covet and to ac- 
quire. " Our chief want in life is some- 
body who shall make us do what we 
can," says Emerson. The strong man 
does that for himself, both making the 
standard and holding himself up to it. 
The rest of us need the stern stimulus of 
necessity, or the kind incitements of a 
friend. Such helpfulness as that requires 
both intensity and communicativeness, 
and sanctifies them. 

Indeed, this third principle of spirit- 
ual helpfulness is the corrective for an 
otherwise pernicious and egoistic self- 
culture like that of the Oriental mystic, 
or some of the numerous " new thought" 
cults of our day. We are not primarily 
to fit ouselves to be at home and com- 
fortable in the spiritual world of the 

138 



LIVING FOR THE FUTURE 

future. We are to train ourselves by 
intensity and by communicativeness for 
a life of eternal ministry. To mention 
it is to prove it. How can any one sup- 
pose that the need for mutual helpful- 
ness will cease when we pass into a 
higher sphere? Would it be a higher 
sphere if that need had disappeared? 
None of the great poets has thought 
so. None of the implications of person- 
ality points in that direction. And if you 
and I cannot without a wrench contem- 
plate so simple a programme as that 
of the Boy Scouts, — "Do a good turn 
every day/' — how shall we hope to 
walk without shame among those whose 
lives are nothing more than wise and 
happy and unhampered ministry to 
other lives? 



XX 

It is time now for us to lay aside al- 
together the flimsy pretext that the right 
kind of living for the future can be any 
other than the right kind of living for 
the present. That pretext served to whet 
our interest in a bold flight of fancy at 
the outset, wherein we tried to reason 
out what may be and probably are some 
of the occupations of eternity. We found 
them to be not unlike the higher and 
more admirable occupations of this 
world. Then we undertook, still with 
the pretense of examining an unfamiliar 
subject, to see what kinds of preparation 
for such a world could be enumerated, 
outside of the well-known religious 
principles of turning away from sin and 

140 



LIVING FOR THE FUTURE 

seeking to be reconciled with one's 
Maker. Having discovered several such 
methods of learning to live without a 
body, namely, intensity, communica- 
tiveness, and helpfulness, we were about 
to end the elaborate deductive process 
with a Q.E.D. 

And now it dawns upon us that these 
and all related qualities of character are 
just as important to our usefulness and 
happiness in this world as in the next; 
that every day we practice them, we are 
better citizens and better neighbors and 
better friends, as well as better Chris- 
tians. There remains only the solemn 
farce of declaring that things which are 
equal to the same thing are equal to 
each other. The highest duty of earth is 
the highest duty of heaven. Life is im- 
mortality, when it is the right kind of 

141 



LIVING FOR THE FUTURE 

life. " Thy will be done, as in heaven, so 
on earth." To be truly good is to abolish 
the dead line between the next twenty, 
forty, fifty years of life and what follows 
— to live for the whole of it, expecting 
no break. And all our study of " living 
for the future " has only served to show 
us that there is no other kind of living 
worthy of the name. 

Living for the future is living in such 
a way that we help to make the future, 
and the future helps to make us. It is 
living by faith in ourselves, as the heirs 
of eternity; in our fellow men, as the 
companions of eternity; in God, as the 
Light of all our seeing, the Force of all 
our better striving, and the Goal of all 
our journey. 

It is well to remember that while 
reason and analogy have enabled us to 

142 



LIVING FOR THE FUTURE 

see with a certain clearness and fresh- 
ness what qualities of character may 
perhaps be most important in the future, 
as they are in the present, reason can 
never give us those qualities. Only life 
can do that. And the more abundant life 
comes when to the vision of a boundless 
eternity is joined the strenuous and sol- 
emn energy that comes from the brevity 
of earthly endeavor. Some of our tasks 
and some of our privileges must be begun 
here, or they will never be begun at all; 
some of the opportunities we miss now, 
we miss forever. There is no encour- 
agement for the idler, the shirker, the 
drone. For them it may well be true that 
"The night cometh when no man can 
work." 

In all that has been said we need not 
be surprised to find just what we have 

143 



LIVING FOR THE FUTURE 

been hearing all our lives from the sa- 
cred words of Scripture. Probably the 
professional religious teacher would be 
eager to point out that this intensity of 
the inner life, this willingness to share 
one's deeper thought, this desire to help 
one's neighbor, are nothing more than 
other names for prayer and worship and 
Christian charity. So it is, indeed. We 
have taken a bypath, and come out on 
the main road. And in the presence of 
all the mysteries and the unanswered 
questions that we have not dared to 
touch, there is only one word that jus- 
tifies the confidence that the truth is 
better than our brightest hopes. That 
is the word of the only one who really 
knew anything about it, and who, be- 
cause he knew, would not tell. He re- 
assured his disciples, not by satisfying 

144 



LIVING FOR THE FUTURE 

curiosity about the future, but by re- 
minding them that he was going before 
them into the unseen, and that all would 
be well. " If it were not so, I would 
have told you." 



XXI 






It would seem, then, both from the 
standpoint of unaided reason and from 
that of revelation, that the whole duty of 
man toward the future might be summed 
up in the three maxims, live intensely 
. — be yourself; live communicatively — 
give yourself; live helpfully — forget 
yourself in order to remember others. 
But there is one thing more that is in- 
volved in living for the future, not a 
duty but a privilege. What is future for 
us is for the great company of the un- 
seen an eternal present. To them, as 
they walk their unseen ways, we may 
lift our hearts in vague but reverent sa- 
lute, that is something more than mem- 
ory and something less than prayer. 

146 



LIVING FOR THE FUTURE 

Browning's "Epilogue" is often mis- 
quoted, or rather misinterpreted. We 
hear the line, " Greet the unseen with 
a cheer," spoken as if " the unseen " 
meant the unseen mystery, the unseen 
event, the unknown morrow — as if the 
adjective were to be construed with 
a neuter noun understood. But what 
Browning said was that we should greet 
with a cheer the unseen friend, who in 
his earthly life 

" never turned his back but marched breast 
forward, 
Never doubted clouds would break, 
Never dreamed, though right were worsted, 

wrong would triumph 
Held we fall to rise, are baffled to fight better, 
Sleep to wake." 

It is to him, to the poet, the prophet, the 
hero, to that father, brother, lover, friend 
of each one of us, who is now unseen but 

H7 



LIVING FOR THE FUTURE 

living somewhere still, that we should 
raise a cheer. Whether he hears that 
cheer or not, it ennobles our own unfin- 
ished struggle with a glimpse of the goal. 
We have a Memorial Day for the de- 
parted soldiers of our wars. It is a good 
day, and should cease to be a holiday in 
order that it may become a holy day; 
the last Sunday in May should be cele- 
brated forever, with an increasing per- 
ception of its deeper meaning as the last 
of those who began the observance pass 
into the unknown. But we need such a 
day for others than the veterans. We 
need a day — perhaps early in Novem- 
ber, at about the time when a part of 
the Christian Church celebrates All 
Souls' Day — upon which all those who 
are so disposed may do honor to the 
Great Majority. In every school and 

148 



LIVING FOR THE FUTURE 

college and university there might then 
be recalled the memory of those illus- 
trious alumni whose names now bear 
the star. We need a Decoration Day 
when there shall be garlands for the 
heroes of peace, wreaths for genius, 
flowers for every unseen friend. This 
generation needs a day once in the year 
when boys and girls, and young men 
and young women, shall be called upon 
in their several places of assembly to 
stand up, and look up, and raise the 
right hand in salute to the departed. At 
the dinner table on that day the mem- 
bers of the family, the club, might well 
stand and drink in silence a cup for 
auld lang syne. The Eucharist in the 
churches on such a day would take 
on a new meaning; it would stand for 
the communion of all souls. 

149 



LIVING FOR THE FUTURE 

But no such day, no thought that 
might lie back of it, could ever help us 
much unless we thought of it as the day 
not of the dead but of the ever-living. 
There has been too much living for the 
past, both in church and state. We have 
seen dead customs and dead creeds gov- 
erning the present and fettering and 
thwarting its life. The memory even of 
the just is not blessed unless it is linked 
with hope. In all such reverence as we 
pay to the lives that seem to have ended, 
we do well; but in such reverence as 
we pay by our own better living to those 
invisible lives that have really just be- 
gun, we do far better than we know, 
better both for them and for ourselves. 
By living so as to do them honor, by 
carrying on their unfinished tasks, and 
by sending up to them now and then the 

ISO 



LIVING FOR THE FUTURE 

swift, keen, grateful thought of recog- 
nition and companionship, we are, once 
more, living for the future in such fash- 
ion as to make our present wiser and 
better and more enduring. 



XXII 

We have come a long way. We have, 
like Lear, sought to "take upon us the 
mystery of things, as if we were God's 
spies." We have followed the daring 
example of Omar Khayyam, and arrived 
at his somewhat trite conclusion: — 

44 1 sent my soul through the invisible, 
Some letter of that after-life to spell : 
And by and by my soul returned to me, 
And answered, ' I myself am Heaven and 
Hell.' " 

And like Omar we must all say at 
last, — 

44 There was the door to which I found no key ; 
There was the veil through which I might not 
see." 

Much of the fabric of our vision is in- 



LIVING FOR THE FUTURE 

deed such stuff as dreams are made on; 
and perhaps none the worse for that. 
We have begun with the hypothesis of 
personal immortality, which is itself in 
this age a dream to many noble and 
reverent minds. And upon that we have 
built our airy towers and pinnacles of 
inference and speculation, ail in a vain 
effort to guess what man was never made 
to know. It is, when so considered, from 
the angle of mere reason and demon* 
stration, indeed a dream. Perhaps life 
itself is a dream, from which some never 
wake. But a good deal depends on what 
sort of dream we have, both of this frail 
mortality that we know so well, and of 
that unimaginable morning a when we 
dead awake,' 9 if the dream comes true. 
That strange and brilliant but unfortu- 
nate English poet, Thomas Lovell Bed- 

*53 



LIVING FOR THE FUTURE 

does, asks us all a searching question 
when he inquires, — 

44 If there were dreams for sale, 
What would you buy ? " 

But dreams are not for sale. 






XXIII 

As the years go, life in an age like 
this becomes more and more largely 
either an admiration or a despair. By 
such an admiration as comes from the 
contemplation of the immortals, we may 
escape the dullness, the pettiness, the 
weariness, that the passing of youth so 
easily leaves behind. See how they 
march in victory ; behold how they rest 
in peace. Remember their long striving^ 
and consider their perfect calm. Ponder 
the deep secret of their coming hither, 
and of their going hence. But demand 
not that they return. 

For perhaps we are not to look for 
any experimental confirmation of our 
hope of immortality, save such confir- 
ms 



LIVING FOR THE FUTURE 

mation as comes from living in that hope. 
Commune with the earth, whence man 
arises, and whither he seems to return. 
Salute the sky, where light resides, and 
where all vapors pass away. Ask of 
them both, of the earth his mother and 
of the sky his father, what they have done 
with him now; and they will answer 
only with the harvest, and with the dawn. 
He is, they intimate, neither a flower 
nor a star, that they should bring him 
back in his season. He came; he is 
gone; he comes no more, is not to be 
repeated. The scattered fragments of 
Osiris are not to be recovered beneath 
the sun ; if he shines again, it will not be 
here. The faithful Isis buried all of him 
that she could find, but one thing escaped 
her and so could not be buried, and that 
— was Osiris. "What is man, that thou 

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LIVING FOR THE FUTURE 

art mindful of him ?" That which we 
know most surely about him is, that he 
departs. 

But out of his buildings looks a soul; 
under his music sings a deep desire; 
between the dusty pages of his forgot- 
ten books there is a breath of spring. 
By men he is soon forgotten; by the 
earth at last disowned, because even as 
dust he ceases to be fertile; by the sky 
rejected, because he is too much lighter 
than the air. It is as though he were 
not; yet we know that he has a home, 
and that it is we that wander. 

* l Nothing of him that doth fade 
But doth suffer a sea-change 
Into something rich and strange." 

Consider then this mystery: that nei- 
ther in the earth nor in the sky can you 
find that brave Spirit of the man, which 

iS7 



LIVING FOR THE FUTURE 

he truly was, and is, and shall be when 
all flesh has passed away. And having 
found him not, revere him; because, like 
Eternity, of which he is a part, he must 
for what remains of Time elude you 
and lead you onward, in a quest that is 
its own reward. " Greet the unseen with 
a cheer." For to greet the unseen, to 
recognize the reality of spirit and the 
supremacy of love, is immortality. 



A SONG FOR ALL SOULS 
I 
Sing for the brave whom men revere, 

The brave whom no man knows, 
Who face the dark and conquer fear, 
Confronting unknown foes; 
Sing for the brave. 

Sing for the loyal and the true, 

The silent souls obscure, 
Who waver not the long years through, 

The steadfast and the sure : 
Sing for the true. 

Sing for the gentle and the kind, 

The merciful, the tender, 
Who guide the erring, light the blind, 

And all for love surrender: 
Sing for the kind. 

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LIVING FOR THE FUTURE 

ii 
Sing for the dead who died for love, 

Whose life was but a song, 
Red is the rose their graves above, 
Green is the grass and long: 
Sing for the dead. 

Sing for the dead who died forlorn, 
The dead who died in glory. 

Tell for the children yet unborn 
Their old, forgotten story: 
Sing for the dead. 

Sing for the dead who died to save 

Freedom and fatherland. 
They knew not why they had to die, 

But now they understand: 
Sing for the dead. 

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LIVING FOR THE FUTURE 

Sing for the dead; they cannot sing 
What our gross ears can hear. 

Echo the songs they fain would bring. 
Sing, for the dead are near — so near: 
Sing for the dead. 

in 
Sing for the dead, the unfulfilled, 
The child, the youth, the bride; 
The poet's voice too early stilled; 
Dreams unfinished, and hopes denied; 
Beauty and pride the grave doth hide : 
Sing for the unfulfilled. 

Sing for the dead that tried and failed, 

Or never tried at all ; 
Who lived in vain through peril and 

pain, 
Fell, and never got up again, 
And suddenly heard the last great call: 
Sing for them all. 
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LIVING FOR THE FUTURE 

Sing for the day that is over at last, 

Sing for the resting bed ; 
Sing for release, sing for peace, 
Sing for rest that is last and best, 
Sing for sleep that is long and deep; 
Sing for the silent dead. 

IV 

Sing soft and low; 

Do they hear ? Do they know ? 

We come and we go, 

But they stay. 
Life laughs and weeps; 

Death sleeps. 
Life loves and hates; 

Death waits. 
Life sings and sighs; 

Death 's wise. 

No surprise, 

162 



LIVING FOR THE FUTURE 

No fear comes here, 
No war any more, 
No day, no night. 
All 's well, all 's right, 
All 's finished at last; 
Debts paid, danger past. 
Sun 's in the west; 
Let them rest 

With the sun; 

Day 's done. 

v 

Sing for the lost whom God has found 

Beneath the land and sea. 
The souls astray have found their way 
Back to the light of the endless day, 

Back to eternity. 
He called the armies under ground; 
From sunken ships he called the 
drowned; 

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LIVING FOR THE FUTURE 

Lost souls rose when they heard that 
sound. 
Sing for the lost and found. 

Sing for the living that cannot die, 
Because they know the way 

To cross the sea and pierce the sky; 

For brains wear out, but souls can fly 
Through night to find the day. 

Sing for the lives that rise and soar, 

Sing for the souls that die no more, 

Sing for the everlasting shore 
Beyond the restless sea. 



Sing for the free, wherever they be, 

In this world or a better, 
Whose spirits bold no chain can hold, 
No past enthrall, no fate enfold, 

Whose life no death can fetter; 
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LIVING FOR THE FUTURE 

Whose souls arise before our eyes 
From prison cells to Paradise: 
Sing for the free, 
Wherever they be. 
Sing for all souls! 
Sing! 



PRAYERS FOR THE ETERNAL LIFE 

I 
O Thou who hast set eternity in the 
heart of man, and hast made us all seek- 
ers after that which we can never find, 
forbid us to be satisfied with life. Draw 
us away from base content, and set our 
eyes on far-off things. Keep us at tasks 
too hard for us, that we may be driven to 
Thee for strength. Deliver us from fret- 
fulness and self-pity. Make us sure of 
the goal we cannot see, and of the hid- 
den good in the world. Open our eyes 
to beauty by the way, and our hearts to 
the loveliness men hide from us be- 
cause we do not trust them enough. 
Bind us by fast bonds to the brother- 

166 



LIVING FOR THE FUTURE 

hood of those who love Thee better 
than they know, who serve Thee in the 
darkness, and even in their doubts will 
never give Thee up. Shine Thou upon us 
with such light as we can bear. Show us 
such truth as we can understand and 
obey. Save us from ourselves, and fill our 
hearts with the vision of a world made 
new. Help us to desire no reward but 
the utter freeing of our souls from the 
bonds of flesh when the days of our years 
on the earth are fulfilled. 

ii 

O Everlasting Father, steady us in 
the midst of a changing world. We have 
lost our fatherland, and have not found 
the land beyond the sea. Our hearts are 
restless and athirst for the living God, 
who made us what we are. But Thou, 

167 



LIVING FOR THE FUTURE 

O Lord, art steadfast and unshaken. 
We know that Thou art the Master of 
all things visible and invisible, and that 
there is none among all the powers of 
evil that can withstand Thee. Quiet our 
nameless fears, drive out the dread of 
death, and of a dreary, helpless life after 
death. Grant to us a hope of immortal- 
ity that shall not vanish in shadows 
when our sun is setting. Show us an in- 
visible world far better than men have 
dreamed of or desired, and a light too 
bright for mortal eyes. We ask not for 
a heaven wherein to be made happy, but 
only to have more time to do the tasks 
we have failed in here, and to learn how 
to be free. Deliver us from haste and 
dismay, and set our daily life before 
us in the quiet light of eternity. 

1 68 



LIVING FOR THE FUTURE 

in 
O Thou who art the shepherd of all 
wandering souls, we who have loved 
too few, and none aright, beseech Thee 
to teach us compassion. Show us the 
hungry hearts of men and women, 
turned bitter with long waiting, that 
with understanding we may love those 
who love us not. Blot out of our re- 
membrance all harsh words, and make 
us ever mindful of the hidden pain that 
others must endure. To all weakness 
that men bear as a burden from the 
past make us very merciful. To all de- 
fect of love in those who have never 
been loved make us forgiving, when 
we remember how richly we have been 
forgiven. Show us the hidden tragedies 
and thejiidden heroisms of those whom 

169 



LIVING FOR THE FUTURE 

we have thought to be our enemies. 
Help us to look upon the thwarted 
souls of men in the days of their life as 
we shall look upon their still faces in 
the day of their death, in order that 
now, rather than then, understanding 
all we may forgive all. 

IV 

We thank Thee, O God, for light 
after darkness, and for the endless re- 
newing of life. Thou that art never 
weary of setting us free from the bonds 
wherewith we have bound ourselves, 
make us to walk abroad in this new 
day without fear, or any kind of bond- 
age. Teach us to enter humbly into 
the heritage of truth won for us by 
saints and martyrs of old, that their 
sacrifice may not have been in vain, 

170 



LIVING FOR THE FUTURE 

but that they, being perfected in us, 
may be glad after all their griefs. Open 
our eyes to perceive new light, and our 
ears to hear the new voices of the age 
that is calling us. Show us how to help 
men and women to be more truly them- 
selves. Fit us for the life that is await- 
ing us in the new kingdom of heaven 
upon earth that is near at hand. And 
may we gladly give up all things for 
that. 

v 
O Thou who art the Father of all the 
faithful, give us the great gift of faith. 
Help us always to believe in the best 
that we know, and the best that our 
hearts have hoped for. And may we 
never be utterly cast down when we 
look upon the ruins of our happiness, 

171 



LIVING FOR THE FUTURE 

ur the failure of all our strivings after 
goodness. Bid us then arise in patience 
and good cheer to take up the broken 
task once more, to rebuild the eternal 
mansion-house of God in the midst of 
our vanishing days. And so teach us 
that by our daily failures we may learn 
how to outlast Time, to rescue from 
decay and oblivion all that is best and 
loveliest and most fleeting, and to be- 
come true citizens of the kingdom of 
heaven that passeth not away. 



THE END 



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